Dedications

For the 2026 Williams Art Community Project (WACP)

Dedications consists of a pair of portraits: one dedicated to my father, and another dedicated to my dedication to my grandmother. Through an obsessive attention to visual detail, these paintings explore the persistent capacity of physical objects to bear personal and cultural meaning in digital modernity.

Bio

Andy Huang is a Chinese-American artist from Dallas, Texas who is enamored with the visual properties of light and color. His paintings, drawings, and films are entirely about (mis)communication and (missed) connections.

Andy majors in Political Economy and Art History and Studio, and is currently attending the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford (WEPO). His work has previously been displayed in the Texas State Capitol rotunda.

吃 (2024), oil on canvas.

吃 is a painting of my father playing mahjong. Each object depicted is associated with successive layers of cultural and personal meaning.

In mahjong, 吃 (chī) is called to claim a tile discarded by the previous player and complete a sequence of three consecutive tiles. This exposed set of 1, 2, and 3 of the 萬 (wàn) suit indicates that my father called 吃 earlier in the game.

吃 also literally means "eat". The title of the painting is therefore also a visual pun referring to this plate of sliced oranges. In Chinese-American households, preparing and plating fruit can be a culturally significant experience, and mandarin oranges are a particularly culturally significant fruit.

Many of the objects depicted are personally significant to my father or myself. For instance, the New Balance fleece  is one of my father's favorite jackets, while the mug is one of my favorite cups. Some of the visual properties of other objects expose personal idiosyncrasies informed by culture: the tackiness of the pink tablecloth and colorful woven FitBit strap express a certain Chinese composure or perhaps an indifference to Western aesthetics.

Dedication (2025), oil on canvas.

Dedication depicts an incomplete painting of my grandmother, in progress, overlaid with a projection of the reference photograph.

In Dedication, I deliberately collapse the distinction between underpainting and finished surface. This dichotomy is emphasized by chromatic contrast: the yellow ground persists as a final layer, while the subject of the painting, including the partially completed pink underpainting of the subject, is rendered within it. In doing so, this painting imitates a static moment in time which, in turn, depicts a painting which seeks to capture a static moment in time. Dedication constitutes a finished work while positing its own incompleteness, reflecting the thematic question of whether dedication refers to a process or product.

The use of cyan, magenta, and yellow reflects the digital nature of the projection, which uses the primary colors of light rather than blue, red, and yellow, the conventional primary colors of painting. The intensity of the magenta and cyan was especially difficult to replicate, creating an imperfect projection of color which imitates the imperfect translation of meaning across depictions as successive (re)enactments of dedication.

While areas of the painting representing the overlaid projection are colored, the background instead preserves the yellow underpainting. It is possible to discern the projection reflecting off the forms of a glass palette and metal easel. These instruments implicate a process of painting which has been flattened to a moment in the completed product.