Bonnie Huang

Bonnie Huang is a gatherer of kerbside trash, textures, and symbols that explore the crevices between the public and private. They work across sculpture, casting and carving processes, image-making, performance, and text, to create installations that foreground our shared languages of intimacy. Informed by an observational process, they digest and subvert commonplace objects, popular culture from the digital realm, and scenes of public architecture to reveal what lies within the chasm of our dreams and how sites of power can be constructed and contested. They’re interested in how desire manifests in capitalist structures, perversity, social codes, and how people come together. Underpinning their practice is the search for sacredness and clarity through acts of clownery, rebellion, devotion, and otherness.

Bonnie Huang’s Micro Commission Project, ‘Thirst Trap’, images The public bathroom as a space where architecture performs the work of the body, and the body is disciplined into architecture– both extending from and collapsing into one another. It is an order placed upon human waste, historically impacted by class structure and heavily policed to create social exclusion. Simultaneously, outcasts have always found a way to use them as communal meeting places to provide refuge and privacy for those that cruise it. Our excess circulates through pipes, pumps, vessels, and thresholds, echoing organs, plumbing, and ritualised acts of cleansing. The bathroom becomes an extra appendage or a surrogate body: one designed to manage excess, regulate flow, and disguise the labour of maintenance behind surfaces of hygiene and neutrality. Here, Thirst Trap invites a perverse and provocative outlook on the bathroom, allowing desire and subsequent human connection to exist between the crude waste management system and its users. The work imagines the bathroom as a persona: a seductress of a clean chic fantasy who also handles your waste and dirtiest excesses, to highlight how personal identities and urban architecture shape our lived erotic experience. This site-specific installation unfolds within the bathroom as three separate interventions on the main touch points in the ritual of going to the toilet: flushing away your waste, wiping away excess, and washing away contaminants. The bathroom is simultaneously: a space designed to manage excess, regulate flow, and disguise the labour of maintenance behind surfaces of hygiene and neutrality; as well as a space for private desires to unfold and for personal impurities to overflow beyond our bodily constraints. From the perspective of a sex worker, this relational exchange system where desires and hygiene are negotiated is a familiar dynamic. Like me, the bathroom is a service worker, a seductress, a machine, a system. We deliberately indulge in the farce of the “young-girl” to mine desire for our own advantage, but still under behest of the spectacle that exploits us in the libidinal economy. The installation celebrates the quiet continuous motions in our leaking and desiring bodies which persist and seek touch within systems designed to contain them, inviting audiences to read their surroundings in an erotic manner.

Having recently completed their studies at University of Sydney, they have since been an artist in residence at Parramatta Artists’ Studios and received the PAS 2025 Creative Fellowship which supported the presentation of their first solo exhibition at Puzzle Gallery. Other residencies include PAS Open (online) and Hyphenated Projects (Naarm). Notable achievements include fbi SMAC 2025 Artist of the Year, USU Creative Awards Prize from Verge Gallery in 2021, and c3West a collaborative public art presentation between ACON and the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2026. Other exhibitions include Schmick Contemporary, Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, and Firstdraft. Community engagement and collaborative process informs the way they move through art-making as a performer and educator, they have performed and facilitated workshops at Gosford Regional Gallery, Riverside Theatre, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Biennale of Sydney.

@bonniiehuang