Immaculate Conception

by Ling Ling Huang

This was the first lesson Mathilde taught me: artists create works of art; geniuses curate an emotional response.

Even the way I was beautiful seemed to lack imagination. Was I beautiful or just symmetrical?

In the moments when I felt like she was really present, I was rewarded with the most charismatic and intelligent person I had ever met.

The Noguchi Museum, the Guggenheim, MoMA. The Frick, the Cloisters, the Neue Galerie.

Every day, the Met. I couldn’t express what it meant to walk around in the places that had been so inaccessible and hallowed, they had become almost mythological to me.

I flew to Giverny every few weeks to try custom dresses sewn with flowers from Monet’s garden.

What an unbelievable scam it is to get everything you’ve been told to want.

“Don’t hold originality up on some pedestal, Enka. Who does originality actually serve? Not the public. The public needs to be shocked and reminded of their own feelings, which everything else in the world seeks to numb. Whatever the purpose of art is, it isn’t to be original for originality’s sake.”