Melissa Huang
No Doll considers the dollhouse as both a symbol of domesticity and site of fragmented identity. Through painting, video, and sculpture, this exhibition studies and deconstructs the archetypes that constrain us.
As a child, strangers would tell my parents, “She looks just like a little China Doll”. This suggested an identity that was delicate, ornamental, and distant from my growing understanding of the self. It felt constricting, being perceived in a way that didn’t align with who I was. In an encounter with a woman at the grocery store, I surprised her and my mother by assertively stating, “No Doll!” in response to her comment.
The dollhouse becomes a space for confinement and transformation. These miniaturized domestic spaces mirror the constraints of traditional femininity, where every detail is controlled, manipulated, and perfected. Hyper-saturated figures in my work are incomplete, distorted, and layered reflecting tension within the self.
No Doll reimagines the doll as a metaphor for reclaiming agency. This body of work invites viewers to interrogate expectations that shape personal and collective selfhood, ultimately questioning the way identity is defined and represented.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Melissa Huang (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Statesboro, Georgia, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art and Graduate Director at Georgia Southern University. Melissa graduated from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University with her MFA in Drawing and Painting (2021) and the Rochester Institute of Technology with her BFA in Fine Arts Studio (2014). Her glitch-inspired painting and video self-portraiture studies the desire, failure, and dissonance associated with portraying an idealized self for an IRL and digital audience. Melissa has exhibited nationally and abroad with recent solo exhibitions at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, the Albany Museum of Art, and Whitespace. Her work has been published in New American Paintings and New Visionary Magazine. She is represented by Whitespace in Atlanta, GA. You can see more of Melissa’s artwork on Instagram (@melissahuangart) or her website (www.melissahuang.com).