In his wide-ranging practice, encompassing many different mediums, including video, sculpture, painting, and photography, Ran Huang explores his fascination with what he sees as the gray areas where opposite extremes—like beauty and monstrosity, pleasure and pain, or love and violence—overlap. “My work explores the uncertainty [of] and complicity between love, sex, violence, and death […],” he says. In his lush, ambiguous video, Blithe Tragedy (2010), for example, Huang conjures a world that is both earthly and ethereal, in which two effeminate male protagonists oscillate between positions of vulnerability and power as they interact with each other in sexually charged, emotionally fraught scenes.