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“Yi Hou often examines the way that labor is a site of fetish and racialization in the bourgeois expression of homosexuality and whiteness. His work asserts that race and sexualities are technologies that can be applied to enervate the political power of the laboring body across the spectrum of its manifestations. If these are technologies, then yi Hou delights in showing the bourgeois predilection to render technology into affections of pleasure and placations particularly through cultural production and art history. In Coolieisms, aka: The Geary Act’s Rough Trade, 2023, we see another sinewy tattooed back framed in an octagonal window facing prison bars, an allusion to Martin Wong’s 1990 Sacred Shroud of Pepe Turcel. Wong famously eroticized criminality through his work, but yi Hou goes further to connect incarceration and sexuality to the Geary Act of 1892, a criminalizing extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Yi Hou cleverly entitled this work “rough trade,” a queer parlance for a fantasized working-class lover. It’s a wink; lusty, sardonic, and perhaps, too knowing about how these fantasies around race and labor often lead to violence, dehumanization, and imprisonment. It’s a painting about the libidinal desire to represent that system of reproduction that keeps trade subject to incarceration, deportation and degrading conditions of work...->”

“In Coolieisms, aka: Born in the USA (Go and Kill the Yellow Man) (2023–24), the American flag faces him the way it did Bruce Springteen on the cover of his 1984 album. But if the Boss is its hero, the yellow man is its enemy. Scrawled across the stripes are grimly sardonic lyrics from the title track. American troops shall gut the gooks. Our guy stands in a counterpoise, absorbed, concurrently a pumped-up prey and just another man on the prowl. He wants to be penetrated, if the star-spangled blue handkerchief on the right side of his leather assless chaps is a reliable indicator. A Manchu-style braid hangs, like a whip, down his back. Lust howls here, carnal and bloody... ->”