Oscar yi Hou doesn’t represent you.

January 27, 2025
Three years ago, when I wove through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd at the opening for Oscar yi Hou’s first exhibition with James Fuentes Gallery, A sky-licker relation, I had the admittedly self-satisfied thought that here was a win for Asians. It was one of those things you hear your mind say, and I was surprised, alarmed even, by the almost reflexive ease with which this reaction expressed itself. Wasn’t I a person who responded to art with studied, rigorous contemplation? Was I regressing toward an identity politics I was sure I’d left in the past? You’ve heard the story before: I spent a great deal of my Asian American childhood wanting badly to be white, knowing even then that the desire was played out, tedious. It took me off guard, then, when peering over a sea of foggy wine cups at the painting Self-portrait (21); or to steal oneself with a certain blue music (2019)—one among yi Hou’s growing archive of annual self-portraits—I was confronted with the utter absence of this sad definite wanting for another life within the painted figure, and I glimpsed, as if it hadn’t been there before, the same absence in myself.
This is not because yi Hou looks like me—he doesn’t. We’re close in age, myself twenty-four and he twenty-six, but the outward similarities between my half-Korean New-Yorker-via-California and his Chinese-British Liverpudlian background more or less end there. The magnetism of his portraiture lies more in its expressions of attitude—of aura and posture—than any likeness. Self-portrait (25), aka: The beat of life (2024), the eponymous work of his second show with James Fuentes—which ran October 17 through November 16 last year—centers a broad-shouldered, mustachioed, hypermodern embodiment of self-possessed masculinity in the kind of black leather jacket one sees up and down club queues on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. Leaned forward as if to return his viewers’ focus, the figure here is a clear progression from the clean-shaven, almost sleepily boyish repose of Self-portrait (21). Where that younger man seemed to arise softly from his more pastelish, maximalist background, the lines of yi Hou’s latest are starker, the attendant symbology of its frame—white cranes, curlicues of flame that resemble willow branches brushed over ancient porcelain—chiseled and isolated. Both versions of Oscar, though, in their varying postures of knowing charisma, convey not only a confidence of his place in the world, but a desire to occupy it.
The self-portrait’s capture not of a person, but of a desire to slip deeper inside a hole in space that is one’s very own, is what I believe lay beneath the almost careless thought, three years ago, of “winning”; the desire was a victory, or some less American synonym of that feeling divested from any aspiration toward dominance. The frame plays as important a role as the figure in this effect: yi Hou takes Oriental iconography and renders it at once cartoonish, classically Western, and unmistakably contemporary. By turning these symbols into sites of hemispheric amalgam and incorporating them so thoroughly into his portraiture, he achieves a much more concrete association between himself and them than any they might have shared with the nebulous idea of Asia from which they sprung. In other words, these playful anachronisms, stereotypes, and transcultural mutations of Asian aesthetics around his own image have the effect of obscuring, stultifying, and ultimately exploding their definition as such, to the extent that Asianness as a way of being is indistinguishable from being itself. Asianness becomes nothing, and in yi Hou’s work and the crowded scenes that erupt around it, this nothing feels rare and exalted, because most importantly it is also wanting to be nothing. The difference between the kind of art that generates such a feeling and the “representation” of, say, Crazy Rich Asians, is narration versus protagonism. The win comes not because “our stories” are “told,” but because the story is interesting, of no certain meaning, and the choice we made to belong to it, by joining the gallery’s horde, was ours. We are not the artwork’s reason for being—it is its own.


I did wonder, though, if some of the spell of yi Hou’s first show was the “representation” in the crowd—that is, the number of Asians in the room, or the number of people gathered to see the work of this Asian artist. This past fall, I intentionally chose not to attend the opening for The beat of life in part because I wanted to know if, in a white room of paintings that was not a scene, I could find my place, if the feeling of doing so would still surprise me.
It felt good, it turned out, how small I was in that open space, how big the walls. It was a Saturday and I was with my girlfriend. New girlfriend, really. I am naturally excited, but quite cautious of the label. I tend to shrink from naming a burgeoning joy for fear of shattering it, of making it gone before it can really exist. Yet I felt that afternoon in Lower Manhattan, alongside a person with whom the day was young, not only that I had a place in the world, but that it had followed me there, and would anywhere I went.
The centerpiece work for the show, placed at the gallery’s natural focal point on the rear wall, was not a self-portrait, or not exactly. Coolieisms, aka: Born in the USA (Go and Kill the Yellow Man) [2023–24], is a pastiche of the cover art for the Bruce Springsteen album—from which it borrows its name—that displays, rather than Springsteen in jeans, a likeness of yi Hou naked but for a pair of assless chaps, with a queue hanging down his rippling back. The painting’s parenthetical directive—a lyric from the song “Born in the USA,” which takes on the voice of a Vietnam War vet—enlists its reader in the murder of its subject, but that subject himself, the warm laxity of his posture, the pallor of his asscheeks, the assuredness with which he positions himself such that you could kill him, tempts you instead to follow him into the red and white stripes. His alluring combination of submission and swagger could be the reason you spare him—or maybe it’s only that the place he’s going is one where it seems you are both bound, anyway; a home that is also the enemy.

yi Hou’s Coolieisms series, which he began in 2021, reinterprets a term assigned to Asians as colonial subjects of British and American empire via imageries of kink, queer legend and code (cleverly recontextualizing, for instance, Springsteen’s back-pocket bandana). The result is a transhistorical survey of illegality. The artist’s adoption of coolieism contrasts and complements what we might call the post-representation of his self-portraits by reminding the viewer of what homosexuality and Asianness have been made to mean through centuries of caste economics, indentured labor, and sexual oppression—Oriental and queer as invasive, dangerous, and ultimately criminal—and reaffirms, therefore, the accomplishment that a departure from any defined meaning at all necessarily constitutes.
Typifying this mode of redefinition is the other work from the series included in the show, Coolieisms aka: The Geary Act’s Rough Trade (2023). It’s also a pastiche, this time referencing the painter Martin Wong’s Sacred Shroud of Pepe Turcel (1990), wherein another quasi-Oscar is turned away from the viewer, seated now and clothed, albeit in a strapped tank top, his back ornately tattooed by a black-and-red dragon. Rather than the American flag he faces the bars of a prison cell.
yi Hou’s Rough Trade reminds me that in a way, the Geary Act of 1892, which required Chinese Americans to carry a certificate of residence at all times, was a perverse form of recognition, designed to police and preclude other Asians from breaching this country’s shores. As the Chinese are forced to disambiguate themselves, acknowledgement and disappearance occur in the same word. It might be that simple: the wish to be someone else, only the product of a punishment for being someone at all. The act of self-portrait, then, can be to steal back your own image, to reject the conditions of being that form the basis for any such negation.

As I moved on to Self-portrait (25), which hung just beside Rough Trade at the show, Oscar and I, four and three years older than the last time I’d seen him, represented nothing, were nothing but twenty-five and twenty-four, an artist and his audience.
My girlfriend pointed me to another painting toward the front of the room, a small portrait of someone who can only be a lover, it seems, with a plain background of a kind not seen in A sky-licker relation. In the portrait, the subject rests a richly braceleted hand across his own naked shoulder. As we looked at him, this bearded, buzz-cut, undeniably beautiful figure returned our gaze intensely, amorously, but without presumption. The work’s title, Habibi, aka: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it (2024), entwined this person with the final line of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a sentence I recognized and wondered if my girlfriend, too, had read before. The question was somehow important to me in the moment, yet I didn’t ask. The two of us were alone in the gallery, and I suddenly had the strong sense that there would be another time.
