Comments on the Finalist

HUANG Li-Hui’s My Mom is a Good German stems from the artist’s consistent introspection on her own experiences of growing up. Huang not only examines the structure of relationships influenced by political incorrectness and her biological family, but also surveys the anchor points of collisions between multilayered political incorrectness in parent-children and marital relationships. Skillfully translating personal experiences into mass media experiences, the artist’s personal life history surfaces as a representative case that expresses the traumatic experience of a nation in world history. (Commentator / WANG Po-Wei)

Artwork Introduction

HUANG Li-Hui was once watching The Sound of Music with her mother-in-law, Ursula, and was surprised by how Ursula, a German immigrant born during WWII and living in the United States, was nonresponsive to the Nazi scenes and the historic event closely related to her own life. As a daughter of a political victim, Huang’s forced silence and Ursula’s suspension of the history both indicate personal strategies to respond to fixed narratives, and simultaneously point to how the second generation of “those with controversial identities” in history have kept self-positioning in or escaping from the reactive forces of past events.

About the Artist

HUANG Li-Hui was born in Taipei in 1979. She received her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2013. Her work starts with personal difficulties and further discusses the spectrum of relationships and boundaries between individuals and the collective as well as how people differentiate and understand the universality of everyday life to find connections between grand narratives and personal histories. Her chosen media include performance, video and installation, of which the form of presentation changes according to different contexts, spaces and situations in life. She was featured in the 2016 Taipei Biennial, with her work Happy Paradise; and was nominated for the 16^th Taishin Arts Award in 2017, with The Daughter of Time.