Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Film

Born 1996 in Guangzhou, China
Lives in London, UK, and New York, NY

In her video, Yasmine Anlan Huang meets the viewer’s gaze with a single static-camera shot of a human eye. Reflected in its black pupil is a ghostly white figure dancing in slow motion, and the eye steadily reveals itself to be a stage for Huang’s autobiographical theater. The narrator is a fictional persona voiced by the artist—a distancing technique that allows the artist to express ambivalence. The voice recounts a teenage dream of becoming an idol in the Japanese entertainment industry—a dream of love shared and reciprocated. As the narration draws to an end, the dancing figure bleeds beyond the iris and, for the first time, enters the white of the eye and dissolves abruptly, leaving the viewer to question its fate.