O-1 Visas
For his sprawling 2025 installation “HVAC,” Taiwanese artist Liang-Yu Huang meticulously recreated the familiar components of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system out of various types of scrap wood. Surrounding all this ductwork are piles of logs, fragilely fashioned from clay. The color palette is all neutrals, the craftsmanship exquisite. Huang sculpts things exactingly, beautifully, laboriously well, and so it takes a while to process the utter non-functionality of what he’s created. This is not an HVAC system that circulates air; these are not logs that can be used to build a fire or a table. What they are, instead, is a testament to the awkwardness of being a sensitive person in a strange land: familiar but formed of slightly different stuff, trying hard but sort of wrong, being finely made but still vulnerable.
—Lori Waxman 2026-02-13 10:55 AM