My Grandpa Once Taught Me How to Fly a Kite，2025
Material：Reclaimed wood, Paper, Bamboo, Shellac, Mineral Pigment
A collection explores memory, craft, and sustainability through bamboo, paper, and reclaimed wood. Building on earlier chapters of Huang’s 2024 collection Lost Stories, where found furniture was reimagined to honor material histories, this series turns inward, drawing from the designer’s childhood memories in southwest China.
Beginning with color studies on Kozo paper—abstract impressions of blossoms in the night, goldfish gliding through quiet water, and faded film stills preserving fleeting moments—these painterly gestures evolve into lighting forms that echo traditional kite and lantern-making.
Motifs of butterflies, swallows, and mountains—symbols deeply rooted in Chinese folk art—emerge as sculptural lamps. Shades are crafted from bamboo and Kozo paper, painted with mineral pigments and ink, and sealed with shellac, a natural resin secreted by insects. Each lamp rests on bamboo poles and stone-like bases assembled from 19th-century salvaged architectural wood sourced in New York City.
Balancing air and weight, softness and structure, the series embodies memory, material reincarnation, and a dialogue with sustainability, framed not only as the reuse of matter but as the preservation of spirit, cultural heritage, and story.
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New in 2026
Huang’s 2025 lighting series My Grandpa Once Taught Me How to Fly a Kite explores memory, craft, and sustainability through bamboo, paper, and reclaimed wood.
Drawing from childhood memories in south-west China, the work translates fleeting impressions—night blossoms, drifting goldfish, and cinematic fragments—into color studies on Kozo paper. These painterly gestures are then transformed into lighting forms that echo traditional kite and lantern-making, where bamboo structures and hand-painted paper give shape to light. The works evolve into sculptural lamps crafted from bamboo, Kozo paper, mineral pigments, and shellac.
Developed in 2026, the new works extend this language through a deeper exploration of material. Along-side a continued investigation of color, the focus shifts toward material presence and surface. Informed by the artist’s recent trip to her hometown in China, the series introduces naturally patterned Tai Mountain rock reminiscent of ink landscapes, handwoven silk traditionally used in Gongbi painting, and pigments and silver leaf associated with mural painting on stone surfaces. These additions bring a new sense of weight, texture, and tactility to the work, expanding its dialogue between air and matter
