Fresh talent

After a BA, MA and working in designer knitting, Yu Mei Huang is finally able to let her creativity run riot – and with exciting results...

■ It’s sometimes hard to understand with experimental work where the artist is coming from. ‘Why?’ is the question that springs to mind when confronted with some avant-garde art.That is not the case with the work of Taiwanese-born artist Yu Mei Huang. Now London-based, the artist’s voluminous works in white are instantly likeable, their curving forms pleasing to the eye, and their textures demanding the question:‘Can we touch it?’ The answer, if Mei is in the gallery is,‘Yes!’ Constructed from knitting yarn and bubble wrap in circular form on a domestic knitting machine, although Mei has a plan for each work, the materials take over at a certain point, directing the form where they will. Mei often makes use of elastic yarn for its interesting shape-changing property. One thing that is almost universal among us is the desire to pop the bubbles in bubble wrap but thankfully no gallery visitor has ever been so bold. ‘If it’s in a professional gallery, they won’t encourage people to touch the artworks,’ says Mei,‘but when I had an exhibition inTaiwan recently, I encouraged people to touch them and pick them up. I knew they would be surprised at how lightweight they are, and, of course, people like to pop the bubbles, so they are trying to be really careful with them while wanting to play with them. I feel textiles is a discipline where you need to touch the material and feel how it is connected to everyone.’ Calling this collection CAST automatically makes the viewer think they are looking at plaster or resin casts so the surprise is all the greater on picking up one of her light-as-air works. When Mei was growing up inTaiwan she didn’t recognise textile art as a discipline so she decided it would be ‘fabulous’ to be a fashion designer. After a BA inTaiwan she became a textile designer, working for a Japanese designer brand inTokyo but then came to the UK to do a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art from 2017 to 2019. She learned to knit in 2010 and, after leaving the RCA and working on two seasons of London Fashion Week, now has the chance to focus on her knitted textile installations. Mei tells me the CAST project started when she was at the RCA with her desire to use different materials to change the viewer’s impression of knitting as ‘chunky’ and ‘heavy’. She wanted to show people another side to knitting.‘I did a lot of shape-changing textiles, including a collection called A Therapeutic Space, with lots of pleats in knitted fabric, combined with different objects so each work had a different shape. But I was thinking “is it possible for me to build up the shape while I am knitting?” so that was the starting point for this project.’