Huang Chih-Cheng & Liou Jyun-Hao

Fragment is delighted to present Stalker, the first New York and U.S. solo exhibition by Taiwanese artist duo Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao. Based in Taipei, Huang Chih-Cheng (b. 1988) and Liou Jyun-Hao (b. 1992) have worked collaboratively since 2021.

Cinema occupies a particular place in Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao’s practice — not simply as a source of imagery, but as a way of thinking about looking, duration, memory, and the construction of subjectivity. Their visual vocabulary draws on a broad cinematic lineage, from Federico Fellini and Jean Cocteau to the psychological and observational language of the Taiwanese New Wave. The exhibition’s title, "Stalker," extends this dialogue toward Andrei Tarkovsky’s cult film, which has remained a reference point for generations of artists precisely because it transforms movement through space into a philosophical and perceptual experience. Here, the title becomes less a direct quotation than a proposition: to look is to search, to follow, and to enter a territory whose meaning remains unstable.

This process is also embedded in the unusual material construction of the paintings. Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao work with ink, pigment, and watercolor over gold and silver foil on jangji paper (which is then mounted on canvas stretched over a wooden panel), drawing on the historical use of metallic surfaces in East Asian interiors. Before electric illumination, gold and silver leaf did not function solely as ornament: their reflective surfaces gathered faint natural or candlelight and redistributed it through darkened spaces. For the artists, this historical relationship between material and illumination becomes both a technical principle and a conceptual device. Light is not simply something that falls upon the painting; it activates it.