Artist Bio:
Huang’s engagement with cultural identity extends beyond the canvas. Her signature zodiac ink works have been featured in Lunar Fest NJ, connecting her studio practice to the living traditions and visibility of Chinese and Chinese-American communities. She teaches watercolor in Maplewood and is actively involved in community-based arts initiatives.Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the tristate area and is held in private collections. Huang holds degrees in sociology and history.
Manman Huang (b. 1985, Chengdu, China) is a contemporary painter based in Maplewood, New Jersey, working primarily in watercolor and oil. Her practice draws on her background in sociology and history —including research into 19th-century Chinese-American trade — to examine how identity, belonging, and collective memory are shaped by displacement, community, and time.
As a self-taught immigrant artist, Huang approaches painting as a space where personal history meets broader cultural narrative. Her expressive brushwork and vibrant color construct visual landscapes that move between documentation and feeling — rendering familiar environments as sites of memory and meaning. Her ongoing Maplewood Towns and Gardens series reflects on how the place holds emotional and communal resonance for those who arrive, settle, and build belonging.
Huang’s engagement with cultural identity extends beyond the canvas. Her signature zodiac ink works have been featured in Lunar Fest NJ, connecting her studio practice to the living traditions and visibility of Chinese and Chinese-American communities. She teaches watercolor in Maplewood and is actively involved in community-based arts initiatives.Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the tristate area and is held in private collections. Huang holds degrees in sociology and history.
You can find more about her artwork here: www.manmanhuang.com
Artist Statement
“My path to painting was indirect — shaped by studying 19th-century Chinese-American trade, teaching language and culture, and years spent watching how history quietly defines who we believe we are. Quarantine cracked open the time and stillness I needed to act on what I’d long understood: that art is how I make sense of a developing world. Working in watercolor and oil, I paint the places where memory collects — neighborhoods, gardens, the textures of everyday life. As an immigrant, I am always negotiating which histories travel with me and which ones I build here. That negotiation is in every brushstroke: the search for belonging, the effort to make the invisible visible, to honor the resonance of lives lived close to the ground. My practice is rooted in observation, but it reaches toward something collective — the shared weight of place, movement, and time.”
New Brunswick Art Salon 2026 – Watercolor and Mixed Media “Liquid Layers” Exhibition
Education
University of Macau, Macau, China | Master of Arts/History
University of Macau, Macau, China | Bachelor of Arts/Sociology
Selected Solo and Group Exhibition
- 2026, Golden Hour, Cinc Gallery,
- South Orange, NY.
- 2026, Pride-Full, Heidi Gallery,
- Livingston, NJ.
- 2026, 45th Annual Adirondacks National Exhibition of American Watercolors,
- Old Forge, NY.
- 2026, Freedom, Leach Gallery,
- Montclair, NJ.
- 2025, Art on Tap, Montclair Art Museum,
- Montclair, NJ.
- 2025, Elation, The Newark Arts Festival 2025 Exhibition.
- NJPAC, Newark, NJ.
- 2025, Things We Carry: a Contemporary Asian Experience,
- Leach Gallery, Montclair, NJ.
- 2025, Unveiled25, Herb + Milly Iris Gallery,
- South Orange, NJ.
- 2025, State of the Art 2025, Leach Gallery,
- Montclair, NJ
- 2024, Art Uncorked, Montclair Art Museum,
- Montclair, NJ.
- 2024, The Wae Open, Heidi Gallery,
- Livingston, NJ.
- 2024, REIMAGINING, The Newark Arts Festival 2024 Exhibition.
- Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ.
- 2024, Fluid Forms,
- 1978 Maplewood Arts Center,
- Maplewood, NJ.
- 2023, Cross Cultural Perspectives, The Newark Arts Festival 2023 Exhibition.
- Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ.
- 2023, Legacies: Contemporary Newark Artists and Their Stories,
- Rutgers University. Newark, NJ.
- 2023, Streets,
- Paper Mill Playhouse Gallery, Millburn NJ.
- 2023, New Jersey Arts Annual 2023, “Mother Nature vs Human Nature: The Inequity of Climate Resilience”,
- The Noyes Arts Garage of Stockton University
- Atlantic City, NJ.
- 2022, “Sunday in the Park with Asher”,
- Exhibitions and Plein air demo, The Durand-Hedden House.
- Maplewood, NJ.
- 2022, Legacies: Contemporary Newark Artists and Their Stories,
- Rutgers University. Newark, NJ.
- 2022, Revival, Post-Pandemic Visions,
- 1978 Maplewood Arts Center, Maplewood NJ.
- 2021, Unprecedented: Art Responds to 2020, View Arts, Old Forge, NY.
Selected Collections
Durand Hedden House, Maplewood, NJ.
Maplewood Library, Maplewood, NJ.
Manman Huang is collected by various private collectors in China and the United States.
Contact
Website: www.manmanhuang.com