DRILL ON: HUANG YULONG SOLO EXHIBITION
OCT 23 - OCT 30, 2026, NextStreet gallery
You may not know Drill. Don't worry, it's nothing serious.
Wikipedia defines it as a subgenre of hip-hop that emerged on Chicago's South Side, characterised by irregular rhythms and a musical and visual identity that has become recognisable far beyond its place of origin.
That's the definition.
But let's hold on to one thing: that irregular rhythm at the heart of Drill. For his new solo exhibition in Paris, Huang Yulong invites us into a transcultural whirlwind, where figures and objects play on the tension between opposites and the fusion of the incompatible.
In the collective imagination, Drill aesthetics are most often associated with young Westerners with lean, wiry silhouettes. Here, the artist reinterprets this familiar figure by transposing it into a Chinese context: the bodies become those of middle-aged Chinese men, with prominent bellies and relaxed, softened physiques.
In the Chinese social context, the rounded belly is commonly read as the mark of a middle-aged man settled into a certain degree of comfort. This body, deeply rooted in a local social imaginary, takes on the dress codes of Drill, while dragon tattoos inspired by traditional Chinese iconography cover its exposed skin. Chinese and Western visual codes thus converge within a single figure. Cast in gilded bronze, these bodies catch the light of a prosperity that is visible, but not necessarily solid.
The exhibition also includes wall works and floor installations inspired by the markings found on shipping cartons. An ordinary object of globalised trade, the shipping carton is inherently cheap, disposable, ephemeral and devoid of value in itself. Huang borrows its labels and graphic codes, transforming them into signs that become part of his own artistic vocabulary.
Through costly processes of bronze casting and gold-leaf gilding, he reproduces the texture of corrugated cardboard, its damaged edges and shipping marks: a precious material assumes the form of a simple package destined to be discarded. This material contradiction creates a powerful tension. The banality and impermanence of an everyday object are set against the value and permanence of traditional metalworking techniques.
For the artist, this opposition embodies one of the strengths of Chinese street culture: born from everyday life, the street and modest fragments of lived experience, it carries a cultural and symbolic value worthy of being meticulously cast and preserved in metal.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition borrows Drill's visual grammar without simply transposing it. Huang places his observations of contemporary Chinese society within a visual language shared across borders. Through sculpture and mixed media, the works explore the complex relationships between appearance and reality, material prosperity and our perception of the world, local culture and globalised popular culture. As these Chinese figures enter the global imagination, the gleam of gold becomes the veneer of prosperity; the swollen body becomes a metaphor for an era; and the markings on cardboard bear witness to the raw, authentic vitality of a local street culture caught within the flows of globalisation.
Through this body of work, Huang Yulong offers a critical reflection on our time.