Zhile Huang 黄知乐

B. 1994, Shenzhen, China

Lives and works in New York, NY

Education

2023 - 2024 Institute of Culinary Education, New York, NY (Culinary Arts)

2018 - 2020 School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (BFA)

2016 - 2018 Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA

Email: zhile.studio@gmail.com

Zhile Huang (b.1994, Shenzhen, China) is an artist and chef based in New York. The ongoing Screenshot and Expansion series grows out of a simple daily action: he only takes a screenshot when his phone clock shows repeating numbers (11:11, 16:16, etc.). This rule creates the paradox that interests him most: the images are both a record and a failure of record. They capture his life and environment at extremely precise instants, yet everything between those instants is missing. He can intervene by changing wallpapers, exposing or hiding notifications, but he cannot choose when the numbers appear. The work therefore sits between control and accident, intention and constraint, echoing the partially controllable, partially chaotic conditions of contemporary life.

From this rule-based performance—an action whose real-time audience is only himself—Huang builds large-scale composites. He slides through each screenshot to reveal weather, news, conversations and interfaces, then assembles them into long horizontal images. Since 2023, he has used AI tools to further extend and transform these archives: feeding fragments back into generative software, accepting or rejecting its proposals, and letting the image slowly expand over days and months. The final landscapes are not planned illustrations but accumulated results of many small decisions and algorithmic misreadings; they are his images and not his images at the same time, dependent on his choices yet always exceeding his prediction.