Huang Jingyao

Exploring the relationship between memory, the city, and photography through distortion and reconstruction

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

On September 18, 2026, Fotografiska Shanghai presents La Dénivelée, a solo exhibition by artist Huang Jingyao, featuring her series Chaotic Data Fences, Baraka, and the Cityscape. Born in Guangzhou, Huang graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with degrees in Photography and Video and Fine Arts. Now based between New York and Guangzhou, her practice is rooted in photography and extends across collage, sculpture, and installation, exploring the relationship between images, materials, and the ways we see.

The title La Dénivelée, draws on the writings of French theorist Hubert Damisch, who argued that photography does not simply record history, but persistently unsettles it. For Huang, this sense of rupture extends beyond the image itself. It emerges in the tension between photography and art, between the individual and the city, and between memory and material form. These relationships reflect the different forms of distance and disconnection that run through her work.

The series grew out of an unexpected encounter in Huang’s everyday life. In 2021, while spending an extended period alone at home in Guangzhou, she photographed the city’s sunrise and sunset from her rooftop each day. One day, she retrieved an old memory card and discovered that its data had become severely corrupted. Her photographs were divided into sections according to fixed proportions, while parts of the frames were covered by a yellow cast. Over the following days, the card continued to produce new forms of visual distortion: blue blocks appeared across the pictures, structures fractured, and sections of the frame moved out of place. For Huang, these were no longer simply technical errors, but something closer to a Morse code waiting to be deciphered.

Drawing inspiration from the abstraction of prehistoric decorative patterns, Huang breaks these altered views of the city into geometric units and rebuilds them through materials such as acrylic. The resulting works move between photography and object-making. While retaining traces of the places they depict, the photographs gradually detach from their original context and become independent visual structures.

Memory is never fixed. It is shaped by time, experience, and place. The distortions in her photographs give form to this instability, bringing personal recollection into contact with the city around her. What begins as a failure within a digital file becomes part of a broader inquiry into how images carry, alter, and preserve lived experience.

La Dénivelée, brings these tensions into focus, moving between the real and the virtual, the traditional and the contemporary, order and disorder. Here, photography is not simply a way of fixing a moment, but a means of reorganising experience and reconsidering how we perceive the world around us. By taking images apart and rebuilding them in new forms, Huang asks what remains when we use photography to hold on to the world and what inevitably slips away as time and perception continue to change.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Huang Jingyao is a visual artist currently based in New York, USA, and Guangzhou, China.Her artistic practice centers on photography and extends to collage, installation, and site-specific projects. Through a semiotic analytical perspective, she redefines and reconstructs everyday photographic works to explore the significance of time and memory within lived spaces. By materializing fragments of present memories from conscious space into physical space, she examines the meaning and value of personal identity while responding to the echoes of environmental changes. Her work reflects an acute awareness of contemporary surroundings and conveys her creative perspective through various media.