Housed in one of the fair’s few black-box booths, Shih Chieh Huang’s fantastical installation – in which an octopus-like creature, crafted from whirring and blinking electronics, kryptonite-colored goo, and plastic bags, waves comically – and sometimes suggestively. It’s an installation that poignantly confuses the wonder inspired by mysterious creatures and deep space with the mesmerizing effects of technology.

Ronald Feldman Gallery will exhibit a new immersive installation by Shih Chieh Huang, a Taiwanese artist based in New York. Huang’s installation at the Feldman Gallery booth at the 2016 Armory Show was highly praised by the popular press: identified by Hyperallergic as “one of the fair’s most memorable works” and by Artsy as “one of the fair’s most striking pieces.” The installation evoked the bioluminescence of the near total darkness of the ocean’s Disphotic Zone – also called the Twilight Zone. Nature, technology, and everyday materials inspire Huang’s practice.

With his first one-person exhibition at the Feldman Gallery, Huang transforms the gallery space into a hallucinatory environment of light, sound, and electronic machinery. Hanging from the gallery ceiling, motorized sculptures, in the form of delicate tentacles and fabricated from plastic bags, light up and change colors as they inflate and deflate, seemingly to take on a life of their own. Computer cooling fans generate movement, and the circuit breaker that controls the movement of the sculptures is also on display. Other kinetic works are attached to the wall, and creatures comprised of medical tubing with glowing liquid are strung around the gallery between the columns. The highly orchestrated rhythmic inflation and deflation of the multiple plastic appendages - simultaneously rising, falling, expanding, and contracting – create a meditative breathing room.

Shih Chieh Huang, a Ted Fellow in 2014, has exhibited his sculptures and installations at the 55th Venice Biennial Glasstress, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial Japan, Experimenta Biennial of Media Art Melbourne, Busan Biennial, Aichi Triennial Japan, 52nd Venice Biennial Taiwan Pavilion, Biennial Zero1 San Jose, Biennial Cuvée in Austria, the ARC Biennial Australia, and MOCA Shanghai. His solo exhibitions have been held at Smithsonian Institute National Museum of Natural History, Worcester Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, RISD Museum of Art. Huang’s awards include an Artist Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution, a Creative Capital Grant, a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Arts Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Sculpture Award, and three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships.