by jacquin cunningham
assisted by chris williams

Oscar yi Hou’s Next Rodeo

Oscar yi Hou is stepping into an era more driven by the way that the morning light hits the skin of his friends (and maybe those who become more than friends) after a night dancing, and letting the constellation of symbolism which has defined his work to date light the path forward from behind. yi Hou was born in 1998, the same year as fellow artists Amanda Ba and Sasha Gordon who appear in his triptych “Birds of a Feather aka: Chinatown Gangsters,” and together represent the vanguard of figurative painting; and he’s refined his practice as if he’s been at it for decades not just years, blending perspectives on Americana and queer and Asian bodies whose bodies are rendered with a living translucence that suggests a defiance of the body as a play piece to be used and not heard.

Speaking in his studio as it becomes more and more full with paintings of serene stasis captured from clubland encounters during what the artist calls “queer time,” we sat down with yi Hou to discuss where he’s headed, how this new work is an evolution on his last show, and how the body can be tea.

P: You’ve talked about letting go of the influence of academia in the work as you’ve gotten older and your new body of work has left the symbology of Americana go in favor of a deeper resonance to the patterns of your nocturnal life. What moved you in this direction?

OyH: I’ll always be a theoryhead at heart. But as I left the university and began to encounter people from all walks of life—not just those who had gone to elite colleges or read the foundational critical theory texts—I found texts to be less and less important in how I was living my life and encountering the world. In other words, ethics. Queer theory is a great example. Foundational to queer theory is sex, after all. And I read all these texts and had a whole ethics/theory of queer life before I had properly begun to live one, begun to cultivate a queer, sociosexual life. This also bled into my practice—I was deeply informed by a Muñozian approach to community, before I even properly had one.

Theories of the Other; of the ethics of sex; or of relation—these are best approached empirically, in my view. Empiricism leads to a solid set of ethics. And having the capacity to fail, and the generosity to forgive. Encountering people, not texts, in all their contradictory and sticky selves. Autotheory texts can be cool in this way. But ultimately it is life itself, and the willingness to grasp at it, which is the best “text” so to speak. I always talk about grasping, reaching out at life. Rather than just reading about it. Or waiting for it to come to you.

P: You speak about nightlife as a place that queer people can inhabit outside of the heterosexual world and concept of time, and I’m wondering how that’s channelled in the work?

OyH: There’s a completely different set of relational practices, and interactions between bodies, within queer life. If you then also add on chemical alterations alongside durationality, you get a whole new, fascinating way of being in life with others. My friends and I call it queer time, queer temporality. There’s so much more of a density. There’s more drama. Sociality becomes so much more concentrated, potent. You can form profound bonds with people, much faster than usual, because you’re just hanging out for so long. These kinds of relations are especially reflected in the body of work I’m working on. My output is delayed by my actual life by around a few years, because it takes so long to make my paintings. But these ideas have been gestating for several years now.

P: In the same way that this way of living outside hetero-time has impacted the way you connect with other queer people, has it impacted the way you see the field of painting as a whole?

OyH: Nightlife is more than just Bushwick. I think that a lot of paintings have yet to properly explore this mode of life adequately, beautifully. Doron Langberg’s recent body of work really does it successfully, which I love.

P: The bodies in your paintings feel like they’ve been touched, rather than exoticized or othered by their painted state. Those in your studio now remind me of the excitement of meeting new friends in the dark room. Would you say that the sexuality of the work is produced in part by the places you’re depicting and the relationships you have to your sitters?

OyH: To look is to desire, in some way. I love to hold a glance. And to glance back. Libidinal energy often overlaps with the artist’s gaze—the desire to image, to represent, to remember. Which is to say that one’s attraction to someone can take many forms all at once. There’s a deep beauty in these kinds of special relationships. Maybe the sublime, I don’t know. Certainly these desires can all overlap with my work. Let me be coy…

P: How has your cast of characters changed? Are you bringing in new people you were hesitant to paint—or glance at—before?

OyH: I paint largely the same people. I’m not sure how it’ll change. There can be a kind of social micropolitics in painting someone that I sometimes have to deal with. I’ve always been really interested in concerned with ethics of painting. I began to realize that when you have trust with someone else, you don’t necessarily need this whole predetermined ethic of asking, “is it okay to represent someone doing x, or someone of a particular identity, or a trans woman—et cetera. I realize that the most essential part of ethics is actually about vulnerability and trust. And to gain that you have to feel and think.

P: In a way, you’re swapping more obvious depictions of fetishization of the body for a more sensual suggestion of possibility here. So is is it almost like cruising the work as you make it?  

OyH: Leo Bersani talked about cruising as a kind of gay sociability. I find a lot of his work outdated, just to be clear, and not that applicable to my personal life. But his idea about cruising being a sort of rhythmned being, of rhythmed pleasure, I find pretty accurate. When I actually make my paintings, I am literally staring at a person’s likeness for hundreds of hours. But cruising implies a possibility, a stranger. My subjects are not strangers.

P: At James Fuentes, you recently curated Deviations, which brought together 12 artists around the idea of ‘Bodywork’  where you note that if “the body is tea” than it is both capable of producing its own narrative—sexual, sensual, or exciting—but is also itself a site for intervention. Can you talk a bit about how you arrived at this notion and what it means for your own work?

OyH: When I had more of an idea of all the artworks and artists that would be in show, I wrote some rough notes on the connections, and any possible hermeneutic. Bodyworkbecame a useful heuristic. Then the week before the opening, after a couple coffees I decided to properly flesh out the notes into a text and developed it more. I use the idea of work throughout my kind of philosophy of aesthetics. This comes from having studied physics I guess. Work is done to an object, which changes some quality of it, modifies its state in some way. Aesthetics does work in this way. An artwork does work. Someone’s body being tea is a phrase I hear all the time. I love the idea that a body can be tea. Capable of constituting its own drama. Staging its own gossip.

A lot of artists I know deploy the body in ways which either 1) put a body to work, 2) do work onto the normative body, or 3) use the absent-presence of a body to do work. Often through lenses of race/gender/class. In my Coolieisms series I certainly do this. So bodywork just became this useful way to approach my work and all these other queer artists’ practices.

oscar wears his own jeans & boots
eckhaus latta & bottega veneta
and stylist’s own shirt
calvin klein