Michelle Jiaxin Huang
SCULPTURE
Through a practice of speculative wording/unworlding, Michelle weaves between fantasy and fact to explore the quiet dissolution of contemporary life. Working across installation, object, and image, she constructs narratives that question and reimagine inherited notions of progress, asking how alternative design praxis can work towards decoding and demystifying contradictions within modernity.
Michelle graduated with a BFA in Furniture Design from RISD in 2023 and will be starting as a SMACT candidate at MIT in the fall of 2025.
Michelle graduated with a BFA in Furniture Design from RISD in 2023 and will be starting as a SMACT candidate at MIT in the fall of 2025.
MAY 23, 2025
Michelle Jiaxin works with objects and installations to construct fantasy narratives. Can you tell us about your practice and what inspires you?
I’m really drawn to the word “Tool”. It carries a weight that extends beyond the utilitarian. To me, tools are not just instruments for use, but rather facilitators of action and perception. They are forms or ideas that catalyze specific modes of being in the world. In this sense, the body is a tool, the environment is a tool, and so is the object. Much of my work engages with objecthood as a site where these intersections occur. Through furniture, installation, and image, these works operate as agents that seek to question, reframe, and reimagine our spatial experiences.
I’m really drawn to the word “Tool”. It carries a weight that extends beyond the utilitarian. To me, tools are not just instruments for use, but rather facilitators of action and perception. They are forms or ideas that catalyze specific modes of being in the world. In this sense, the body is a tool, the environment is a tool, and so is the object. Much of my work engages with objecthood as a site where these intersections occur. Through furniture, installation, and image, these works operate as agents that seek to question, reframe, and reimagine our spatial experiences.
What role does material play in your object/installation-making experience?
Much of my practice employs speculative fiction as a critical methodology for worlding/unworlding. I'm interested in the subversion of conventional material culture to investigate new pathways for understanding what is being concealed, marginalized, and actively erased within dominant narratives of progress. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of fabulation, my work interweaves fact and fantasy to explore a potential for man-made magic: a material language that resists reductive patterns of abstraction. Under this framework, material becomes a site of narrative resistance, and a medium for imagining alternative possibilities grounded in myth and speculation.
Are there recurring forms, gestures, or materials that feel like part of your visual language?
I’m drawn to materials and forms that hold layered, unstable meanings, ones that gesture towards ambiguity contradiction and slippage. This visual language highlights uncertainty, where fractures become entry points into deconstructing not only physical composition, but also cultural, historical, and ideological significance. Material is never inert, and is constantly being mediated by systems of power. In my work, I play with a tension between speculative fantasy and technical precision to question the dominant narratives guiding our perceptions of material and space. I am particularly drawn to objects and phenomena that carry both scientific and symbolic charge.
Some recurring references include: magnets, satellites, black holes, reproductive cycles, mirrored infinities, and maps.
You mentioned objects carry both scientific and symbolic charge. Can you talk more about this?
I don't think of architecture, objects, or spatial arrangements as ever really static. They carry embedded logics that shape and structure how we experience the built world. In my practice, I’m compelled by the idea that objects exist within a field of relations that aren't entirely human-centric, carrying histories and cultural narratives that unfold across time. In my work, I consider how objects can exceed their assigned functions, how they might slip out of legibility and begin to act in ways that are unpredictable, affective, or even resistant. In this sense, these objects possess a kind of agency, becoming an active collaborator in meaning-making and culture production.
It seems like the objects you create become alive and can develop an intimate relationship with their user. Does the concept of intimacy play a role in your practice?
When I think about intimacy, it's almost easier to think about the absence of it. In response to both the physical and cultural fragmentation embedded in contemporary life, I think a lot about the desire to relate, and to understand. In my work, I am particularly concerned with the ideologies of modern progress, and the ways in which enlightenment rationality has redefined not only our epistemological truths, but also the aesthetic conditions and construction of our built world. The infrastructures that surround us marked by sterility, efficiency and abstraction, reflect a disenchanted worldview that prioritizes order over affect, reason over ritual. Intimacy, once embedded within the fabric of human interaction is now increasingly displaced by systems of abstraction.
In this context, it becomes a site of loss and nostalgia. My practice seeks to navigate this by exploring avenues for connection. Whether this be through formal and material considerations, or through allegory and metaphor, intimacy emerges as a central thread in constructing the speculative narratives that guide my practice. It is a space of potential, where new forms of engagement might emerge in response to the spiritual and spatial alienations of the present.
What kinds of experiences do you hope your audience carries with them after encountering your work?
I think the beauty of objects lies in their immediacy: our ability to relate to them, to hold them, to interact with them. I hope through my reconstructions I can instigate a sense of estrangement in the familiar, to create moments of friction or dissonance that allows something previously unconsidered to surface.