Killion Huang at EDJI: when Tarot becomes a queer language of intimacy

In Ixelles, EDJI Gallery opens a new chapter with Chinese artist Killion Huang, born in 1999 and already a familiar presence in Brussels. For his new solo exhibition, he turns the Tarot into a sensual and political playground where ancestral iconography collides with contemporary queer interiors and lived experiences.​

Tarot as a queer matrix

For this show, Huang presents a series of paintings completed in late 2025, structured around Tarot cards – both Major and Minor Arcana – and treating them less as a fixed tool of divination and more as a fluid narrative framework. Each card becomes a possible scene from LGBTQIA+ life, a snapshot of desire, doubt, tenderness or confrontation.​

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Emblematic figures such as the man, the eagle, the lion and the bull from The World are reimagined as bronze‑like presences, almost sculptural in their solidity. By bringing these statuesque elements into his compositions, Huang hijacks the language of public monuments to suggest that queer lives deserve their own enduring place in our collective imagination.​

Monumentalising queer lives

This “bronze attitude” is not just an aesthetic trick – it reads as a response to the fragility and erasure that still haunt queer spaces worldwide, from digital censorship to shuttered social venues. Where official histories build statues to normativity, Huang builds images for queer tenderness: bodies leaning into each other, figures half‑masked by shadow, gestures that sit somewhere between hesitation and surrender.​

Cards like The Lovers, The Fool, The Star, The Devil, The World, as well as Nine of Cups or Ten of Pentacles, become open doors into everyday moments: a shared bed, a living‑room conversation, a solitary pause in a dimly lit room. Faces are often blurred or simplified, as if to protect the people involved, while posture and touch carry the emotional weight.​

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Thick paint, interior worlds

Technically, this body of work pushes Huang’s practice further. His signature “permanent rose” underpainting still radiates through the scenes, like an inner light, but the surface has grown denser and more physical, with thick layers of paint scratched back into “waterfall” textures where colours bleed into one another.​

Living with colour‑vision deficiency, Huang leans into an instinctive palette of reds, browns and deep blues that anchors the work in a grounded, almost tactile sensuality. These interiors are not mere backdrops; they act as psychological extensions of the studio, fortified spaces for queer desire and community that echo Herbert Tobias’s photographs, Pierre Bonnard’s interior light, David Hockney’s compositions and the figurative language of his mentor T.M. Davy.​

Intimacy, law and queer memory

By fusing Tarot symbolism with domestic spaces, Huang quietly insists on a presence that legal and political systems still struggle to fully acknowledge. In a world where LGBTQIA+ rights are being rolled back in many places, these paintings operate as counter‑archives: even when official narratives try to erase certain lives, they remain vividly present in the visual memory the artist constructs.​

His often anonymous yet deeply embodied figures sketch out a collective portrait of a community refusing to disappear – in law, in media, or online. Tarot, usually associated with predicting the future, is repurposed here to reread the present: each card becomes an act of intimate resistance, a way of saying “we are here, and we are not going anywhere”.​

Practical info

Killion Huang – solo exhibition
EDJI Gallery, Rue du Page 15, 1050 Brussels
Opening preview: 4 March 2026, 6–8 PM | EDJI, Brussels
Exhibition dates: 4 March – 25 April 2026
Info & preview requests: hello@edjigallery.com | +32 455 12 87 45 ​

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