The Artsy Vanguard 2022: Oscar yi Hou

But I was not alive in the summer of 1982, and neither was yi Hou. It’s hard to imagine if there were many Asian American men who found their way to Mineshaft in the ’80s, considering the gaunt, white ideal represented in the gay leather bar’s posters. In yi Hou’s interpretation, the railroad worker has a face resembling the artist’s own, but the body—in all its muscled caricature—is the same. His face introduces difference into the history of the image, and the pickax in his hand takes on a new resonance: that of the Chinese migrant workers who built the railroad out West.

Other loosely Asian iconography surrounds the figure. Black-and-white railroad tracks adorned with little tattoo flames frame him in some kind of virtual space. He stands on top of an incomplete blue-and-white taijitu symbol, while Chinese calligraphic phrases float around him. Above, the word “MINESHAFT” is stylized into a cartoonish, graffiti-like logo mark reminiscent of the doodles elementary school students might scribble on their notebooks. The painting is one of 11 featured in yi Hou’s first solo museum exhibition, “East of sun, west of moon,” on view at the Brooklyn Museum through September 17, 2023.

Yi Hou has had a precocious start to his career. In 2021, during his final year of undergraduate studies at Columbia University, he had his debut solo gallery show, “Crane Seeking Comforts,” at T293 in Rome, and an online exhibition titled “A dozen poem-pictures” at New York’s James Fuentes. Only a few months later, that same year, yi Hou made his New York in-person debut with “A sky-licker relation.” Since receiving a BA in visual arts from Columbia, he was an artist in residence at Silver Art Projects, working nearly non-stop to finish a mural and pieces for the Brooklyn Museum show as the 2022 recipient of the UOVO prize.

His success is partly due to his distinctive style, which is shaped by his upbringing. Growing up in Liverpool, England, yi Hou worked at his parents’ Chinese restaurant, The Great Wall. The adornments around his figures are indebted to the Asian diasporic consciousness he cultivated from that childhood (that many of us somehow share): the forums of DeviantArt, Pokémon, Tumblr, and online chatrooms. In his work, yi Hou paints himself into this historical past, welding together two identities—gay and Asian American—that might have been irreconcilable in visual media at the time.

But yi Hou’s project is not a reparative one: He’s not looking to fill the lack of Asian American representation in the U.S. with his paintings. Instead, he wants to question the more fundamental structures—myths of masculinity, citizenship, individualism—that produce this lack to begin with. “These works could be misinterpreted as giving feminized Asian men masculinity,” Yi Hou said during a recent studio visit. “But it’s more about destabilizing masculinity as a whole. Or at least the integrity of it, especially as it relates to American myths and the ways in which American citizenship is identified with manhood and maleness—you know, Roosevelt stuff—the idea that America was founded by these intrepid frontiers, these rugged individualists.”

This is perhaps most trenchant in Old Gloried Hole, aka: Ends of Empire (2022), a nearly seven-foot-tall painting that presents, leaning in front of a distorted American flag, a queer, Filipino friend of yi Hou who recently became a U.S. citizen. A closer look reveals the artist’s subversion of the flag’s patriotism. On the stripes is text taken from the welcome letter that the White House sends to newly naturalized citizens, here made inscrutable. Meanwhile, the painting’s title compares the nation to a glory hole where men give and receive anonymous blow jobs.

“East of sun, west of moon” is comprised entirely of portraits—some of the artist and some of his friends. It is in these closest personal relationships that yi Hou situates the politics of his practice. “I would describe my figurative works as Personist,” the artist wrote in a recent self-titled publication released through James Fuentes Press. “Like [the poet Frank O’Hara], I’m interested in people and the relationships that I share with People, Persons, with the Whole-World. As O’Hara writes, Personism puts work of art ‘squarely between the poet and the person…the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.’”

Yi Hou reflects a generation ambivalent to discourses of identity and conscious of its instrumentation, as well as the particular ethics of representing marginalized peoples. His portraits are informed by theory, like the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh Ha’s “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking for”; Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s “Right to Opacity”; and postcolonial thinkers like Gayatri Spivak and Achille Mbembe.

Birds of a feather flock together, aka: A New Family Portrait (2022), the group portrait that opens the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, puts many of these theories into practice by representing yi Hou’s “queer family” of sorts. It is a simple portrait; the artist and two of his friends sit looking out at the viewer. Around them is a dense thicket of symbols and signs: cranes—which the artist understands to be himself—as well as other animals, Chinese characters, and color panes. “In a way, they’re all kind of self-portraits,” yi Hou said, “or at least they all kind of record my presence in the world, and my presence in the world is preconditioned by my relationships with people.”

These relationships are the settings for racial histories. In All American Boyfriend, aka: Gwei Lou, Leng Zai (2022), yi Hou paints his boyfriend, addressing the ever-present question among progressive people of color: Is it okay to date a white person? In the work, a young man wearing a white cowboy hat, red plaid shirt, and blue jeans straddles a Breuer chair. The surface around him is left intentionally sparse, breaking up the density of yi Hou’s other canvases.

Borders have always been present in his work, but All American Boyfriend takes place in a particularly interesting third space in which a pair of hands hold up the portrait in a gilded frame. Is it a mirror? A picture? Certain areas of the canvas outside of the frame appear to rip and tear, revealing script in English, Chinese, and other symbols. An ornate gold design adorns the top and bottom of the frame with a kind of lavish orientalism, but the stars around the figure suggest some kind of distorted cowboy paraphernalia. All American Boyfriend is a social construction that we might fall in love with, regardless.

“East of sun, west of moon” brings together yi Hou’s newest portraits with some of his older works, like Cowboy Kato Coolie, aka: Bruce’s Bitch (2021), which was featured in his James Fuentes solo show. The surfaces of these paintings are dense with visual information—signs, symbols, text in both English and Chinese, poetry, and prose—all rendered equally inscrutable. His earlier “poem-pictures” are absent, save for the full text of yi Hou’s poem from which the show’s title comes from. Displayed on the wall as a decal between several paintings, the presence of the poem suggests that we might read the portraits as texts in themselves.

Many of yi Hou’s new paintings reference specific objects in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, which makes the canvases feel like embedded surfaces, spaces that collage many allusions together in one space. In Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, aka: Bushwick Bleeding Hearts (2022), yi Hou depicts a good friend of his, the painter Sasha Gordon, who’s also featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2022. With her dog Boba held in her arms, the work references a jade sculpture of a cat from the museum’s holdings.

And yet there is a disconnect between the symbols and the sitters, who seem unaware of the surroundings they have been painted within. This sense of dislocation reflects what many diasporic queer people feel in America. What is a place like Mineshaft to the queer diaspora? To our ancestors? To history? It enables us to live our lives now, in America, and is indispensable but inadequate to describe the texture of queer diasporic experiences. Yi Hou paints into this space, into an imaginary that looks back as it redefines the present.

The Artsy Vanguard 2022