Artist Highlight - Weixin Huang

1. Lurmin’s Anatomy begins with a wonderfully absurd situation, a teddy bear falling from space and being examined by scientists. How did this story first appear?

The story began as absurdly as it sounds. Outside my old apartment there was an abandoned teddy bear, over a metre tall, lying in the bushes. Every day when I left the building, it had shifted position somehow. I found it funny and started sketching little stories around it, but never developed them further. Then last year NASA published a report about an asteroid with a significant probability of hitting Earth around 2032. I randomly pulled these two unrelated events together — a discarded bear and a cosmic collision — just to see what would happen. That curiosity is how stories begin.

2.  Your pieces ask the viewer to rotate, lift, peek and investigate. How do you design curiosity into an object?

The whole series is designed as an experience of curiosity. When something has an unusual structure — a hinge, a lid, a layer — you instinctively want to open it, turn it over, peek inside. That’s a basic human impulse. I design around that: the interaction itself becomes the content. As you handle the piece and something reveals itself, your curiosity gets rewarded. It’s not only visual — it’s experiential. You have to physically engage with the object to discover what’s there. Every piece is built so that every question you bring to it has somewhere to go.

3. You come from both animation and metalwork. Does the work develop for you like a sequence, a scene, or an object?

My starting point is always narrative. I begin by visualizing a scene or a sequence in my head — not necessarily with an ending or specific plot, but a moment that captures something. From there I draw storyboards, treating it almost like a short film: what’s in this frame, how does the camera move, what shifts between scenes. Then I extract the visual and interactive elements that can translate into physical form. So the work develops like a sequence first, then becomes an object — the animation thinking stays embedded in how I structure the final piece.

4. The series uses enamel, metal, transparent layers, stones, moving parts and magnifiers. How do you decide which material carries which part of the fiction?

Each material has its own character, and I assign roles based on that. Enamel is fragile and vivid, so it carries the figurative, visual storytelling — color, imagery, the illustrative surface. Metal is structural and durable, so it handles the interactive architecture: hinges, enclosures, things you physically manipulate. Beyond these two, I bring in materials that serve the fiction specifically. I use meteorite fragments in some pieces — not for any technical reason, but because they fit the narrative of something that fell from space. The material choice always follows the story’s logic, not the other way around.

5. The teddy bear is ordinary, almost silly, yet the investigation around it becomes elaborate. Is Lurmin important because of what it is, or because of what people project onto it?

Lurmin isn’t important. It’s one of hundreds of thousands of teddy bears, manufactured in factories every day — it has no subjective agency in this narrative. What matters is what happens around it: the assumptions, the projections, the elaborate frameworks people build to extract meaning from something that offers none. The investigation reveals far more about the investigators than it does about Lurmin. So in that sense, Lurmin functions as a mirror — not because it reflects anything back, but because people can’t help seeing themselves in it.

6. You write that the secret is that there is no secret. Does that make the work meaningless, or does it open another kind of meaning?

The secret is that there is no secret — and yes, that means the work is meaningless. But that’s the point. We habitually attach meaning to things, assuming there must be something deeper underneath. Lurmin’s Anatomy sits with the possibility that there doesn’t have to be. The world is as ridiculous as it is, and it’s okay to stay confused, to not arrive at an answer. The meaninglessness isn’t a void — it’s a release from the need to constantly justify or interpret. It really is just that simple.