黄半衣 Banyi Huang

I’ve been working on an inverted body cave combining 3D scanned body texture with height map data from terrains. Capturing skin feels like archiving the talismanic information gathered from body markings — tattoos, piercings, gender transitioning — petroglyphs that witness life as it unfolds. I’ve always fantasized about being a tiny tourist surveying my body, only leaving behind 到此一游. Here, you can glide or settle into 4WD. All this obsessive energy was amplified by a recent camping trip I took with Fade @fade.worm . We drove through rolling mountains in Death Valley, immersed in its back-tingling folds, scorching canyons, and ceremonial heat. When I talked about my project, Fade said it’s basically an inverted glory hole, one that allows a peak into the erotic terrains of our own making. Maybe it responds with wetness towards proximity. Maybe access needs to be limited. I want to learn a way of building scaffolding for sites that can hold stories, sounds, experiences not captured in the colonial relationship to land centered around extraction.

Before attending my visa interview in China, I was advised to print out my O1 petition, which is 1400 pages. For two hours, I waited in line at the US Consulate in Shanghai, carrying this weapon of a document. People with work visas chat each other up nervously to pass the time, watching as others get grilled by jaded English-speaking officers. Where do you work? What’s your salary? Show me your CV. When it came my turn, I dropped the document on the counter, making a thud that pretty much sums up my professional life accumulated over the past 6 years. The officer eyed me up and my stack of documents. “Is that your portfolio?” I nodded. Without one more word, he then signaled I passed, a pathetic look flashing through his eyes. Angered at the system yet relieved I didn’t have to explain myself, I stepped onto an elevator on my way down. The familiar tune of a Richard Clayderman elevator music, I was transported into a no-time zone. Those who get it get it. Your sense of belonging hanging precariously between amnesia and brief flashes of recognition.

September this year, I moved to Los Angeles to start the DMA program at UCLA. Having lived in NYC for 10 years, I miss my friends. It hasn’t been an easy transition. I am learning to guide my body through a lot of change. This quarter, I developed a work called Banxian’s Famous Landmarks. It takes Google’s Mediapipe pose-detection framework as both measurement and metaphor. The framework’s ‘landmarks’, points used to map and measure the body, both echo and diverge from the acupuncture system in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Using a webcam that tracks my movement in real time, I go on a tour of newly-imagined landmarks. A site is activated through a tapping gesture, which triggers an audio story. I then respond with voice and motion, offering a movement prompt that links feeling, narrative, and spatial orientation. Inspired by the Nei Jing Tu, a Daoist diagram depicting the body as a cosmological terrain, this system reconfigures machine vision into a medium for iterating through the archival nodes of my body—inflammation, stress, trauma, and yearning.

They say that Los Angeles is a Heavenly Hell. What a feeling.

i’m excited to look for a collaborator — a game designer interested in experimenting and building interactive narratives together in Unreal Engine. this would be an ongoing collaboration (virtual or in-person) at the early concept stage. i’m especially seeking someone who wants to co-develop both the conceptual and experiential sides — building speculative cosmologies and queer worlding together for QTBIPOC diasporic audiences. my background is in storytelling, research, and 3d modeling. my high is to imagine the merging between spirituality, somatics and 3D worldbuilding, and doing that in a more immersive way that reaches folks who need it. i’m looking for someone who complements that with experience in interactive design, networked environments, and thinking about interactivity as ritual, as portal, as poetics. my vision is to co-create a live performance featuring a morphing deity-animal-organism hybrid, unfolding and birthing itself through movement and sound. with your powers, we would imbue design with ritual intention and Daoist energetics, and cultivate the healing properties of the divine/monstrous feminine. Im hoping to do weekly check-ins over the next few months, but i’m also open to figuring out the form and rhythm that works for both of us. if you are a nerd like me or someone you know who might be into this, please dm me 🧚✨

We worked with artist 黄半衣 Banyi Huang @cropp_topp to conjure up methods of entanglement in a 3D landscape. All thresholds lead back to me through you. So is merging inevitable? And where are you unyielding?

Thank you so much to @alicesparklykat @izdiharstudio @charbot for organizing this art raffle to raise $$ for d!splaced and ev@cuating families. They are working with @whitecoats4blacklives to ensure that your 100% of your contributions will reach the people that need them most. We have so many excellent raffle prizes from a growing list of amazing artists and makers. Check the list for the roster and much more. Tickets are only $15. Link in bio to buy tickets, there is no limit to how many you can buy and you can participate from anywhere! The raffle ends on August 25, so please share widely and participate soon!! I am contributing my sculpture Frolicking in ClitForest, 2023. 3d printed sculpture on motorized turntable 28 x 10 x 10 inches May our invocations of Mazu, the deity that watches over diasporic and d!splaced communities, bring the safety and protection they need. This birthday month, your best gift to me will be supporting this raffle and donating to gofundmes to support families in g@z @

Join us for Daoist talisman writing workshop with Banyi Huang and Phoebe Chen on July 13, 1-3PM 🎫 rsvp link in the bio Drawing from The Tao of Craft by Benebell Wen and our research, we will introduce the history of fu talismans in the Daoist tradition, exploring it in relation to as magical spirituality and shamanism, witches and gender, and the Eastern cosmological framework. This two-hour session will focus on design, going over the various style sand components of sigil making. We will provide examples of sigils and encourage participants to make their own and practice. Join us as we compose poetic template for designing and consecrating desire. Pen and paper will be provided. Donation to cover materials is encouraged. There will also be a link to support the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Lead artists: Banyi Huang (they/them) @cropp_topp is a multimedia artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In their interdisciplinary practice that spans research, writing, and 3D worldbuilding, Banyi seeks to challenge the linearity in Western narratives of technology by re-engaging with Asian folklore, cosmologies and spirituality. Their work has been shown at DEMO 2024, Smack Mellon, Abrons Art Center, The Soto Velez Clemente Center, Special Special, Artist’s Space. Recent screenings include the New Museum, the Taiwan Film and Audio Institute, and Wonderville. Phoebe Chen (they/them) @phoebebeeps is a PhD candidate in the Psychology program at New York University. Their research focuses on how we construct meaning in nouns and verbs, events, and narratives, through collecting and analyzing text and behavioral data. In pursuing the principles of semantics they became interested in the compositional symbolism in esoteric practices. They continue to use divination and magic as theoretical devices for the unconscious, while harvesting its revolutionary potential against the Western normativizing machine.

Fucking in love with these photos that @mengwencao took of me in their Sunset Studio. Meng has been developing a system for combining somatic coaching with portrait photography，最牛逼的一条龙回归身体服务 🐉🌪️🔥 First they gave me a Thai massage and located stress points in my body. They literally felt spirits come out when pressing into these knots. It’s mind boggling to realize how numb we train our bodies to be with these ghosts compressed into our joints and muscles Based on our conversation, Meng led a visualization exercise that combined meditation, breath work and qigong to lead me through a journey of locating my voice of judgment, apparently it’s purple and full of spikes. I then met my future self, who is flowing, radiating, and filled with ease. They hugged me, told me they loved me, and that I already have everything it takes to become them. As we melted into one, my tears came flooding down. I felt supported in a way that institutions and external validation never could, trusting that self love, acceptance and forgiveness will guide me to exactly the place I need to be. That’s how these photos came to be. Not results, just a witness to the process of transformation. The sun literally peaked out from the clouds, reflecting our inner state of consciousness. Thank you so much to Meng 💚💚💚💚💚💚. Check out their service, they truly bring so much love and abundance to the community

Can’t believe it’s already been 8 months. I will be showcasing a project at DEMO2024, NEW INC’s annual festival of exhibitions, talks, and presentations by members this year. Curated by Eileen Isagon Skyars @eileenonline_ and Tony Tirador @tonypastrami , the installation will be at @wsanyc from June 5 to June 20. Address: 4th Floor, 161 Water Street, New York 10038 I will be presenting Triadic Patterning, consisting of a three-channel video, a website that I made as a part of a class I took at @sfpc_nyc , and 3D printed sculptures. This project explores a love story between the daoist deities Qianliyan 千裡眼 (Thousand-Mile Eye) and 順風耳 Shunfeng’er (Wind-Following Ear), and the sea goddess Mazu, rendered in non-binary form. It is a part of my ongoing engagement with mythological beings as externalizations of the worshipper’s internal realities and needs for healing. This year has been an incredibly challenging year in terms of refiguring my relationship to work, burnout, and the heaviness of my immigrant artist identity, yet on the other side it has brought forth spiritual transformation, as I learn to accept and receive messaging through the body. It has been so rewarding to collaborate with Ṭaüs Jafar @taus_jafar for the scoring. A new experience for us both to brainstorm together and for Ṭaüs to develop unique tracks for each deity. Special thanks to my mentor this year Lauren Goshinski @boo__lean , and Rui An @rui_annn0101001 who helped me with technical troubleshooting. And of course, my chosen family who have supported me through tough times, you know who you are. Thank you so much to the @newinc team for co-creating this year 💚

Happy Mother’s Day to my beautiful and strong mother. We are connected not by blood ties, but the threads of fate, tightly wound, encoded by time. Even though trauma and pain may have distanced us at points, but mutual healing has brought us together, loving each other from afar. It was so moving to witness you starting your own business at @laguirtelle , tasting the fruits of your labor on the land, finding inner peace in nature, your cooking now being appreciated and making you a living. Here is to holding each other once again as the children that we all are. The photos you took of me, testify to the growth of the baby seen in your eyes. We are all babies after all. My heart breaks as I think about mothers in Gaza, their children murdered and lost to neverending cycles of colonial violence. What is there to do but to carry the pain forward, and keep fighting?