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It’s the summer of 1982, and I’m waiting in line outside of an East Village bar. The sign above the door states, “DRESS CODE: cycle leather & Western gear, levis and jocks.” Do I look butch enough? Later in the year, Vincent Chin will be murdered in Detroit, but that’s not yet news. For now, I’m trying to get into Mineshaft and I can’t find my friend who dragged me out to begin with. Apparently, Michel Foucault is inside.

A poster on the wall shows a muscular mustached man crouching while holding a pickax and wearing a white tank top, bulging jeans, and a construction hat. In Coolieisms, aka: Gold Mountain Cruiser (The Mineshaft’s after-hours trade) (2022), artist Oscar yi Hou projects himself into a historical past, reimagining himself as the muscled clientele of Mineshaft, and I follow him there, waiting for my friend outside the door [...]

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Despite his youth, the New York–based British artist Oscar yi Hou has a recently opened exhibition of 11 paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, making him one of the youngest artists to have a solo show at a major New York museum. “Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon” will be on view through Sept. 17, 2023.

A self-described “internet kid,” Mr. yi Hou has painted dense compositions, with images and symbols tightly packed in a way that reflect the torrent of information he grew up processing intuitively.

Although most of them qualify as portraits, a familiar genre to viewers, his paintings cannot be easily read, and they are not meant to be [...]

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[...] It is partly for these reasons why yi Hou holds onto what Édouard Glissant called a “right to opacity.” It is telling that his sitters are rarely explicitly identified. Yi Hou paints their names but typically renders them in marked wisps, like smoke drifting from incense. Any text in his paintings reflects his own language, a kind of script that dances between calligraphy and graffiti. The familiar strokes draw you in before they quickly prove illegible. Yi Hou has produced an entire series of these text-heavy works, hieroglyphic permutations of his writings that he calls “poem-pictures.” “I did them almost as an experiment to see how people would receive that if you can’t read them,” he said. “I think there are moments where artists are able to make that refusal.”

This desire to evade easy interpretation of his paintings—and a glib consumption of his subjects—is especially notable in a market saturated with figurative painters. In making space for refusal, yi Hou affords protection to the people he portrays, continuously enacting a practice of resolute generosity. [...] 

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[...] Seeing yi Hou’s work amidst a crowd of other twentysomethings fresh into the gallery from a day that had been hot and damp, hopelessly sweating through an outfit I had probably chosen with great effort for the occasion, I was faced with exactly that: the discomfort, the relief, the multiplicity and solitude of the person.

With me at the exhibition were several people who had modeled for the paintings. I saw them as they existed both in the real world [...]

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[...]

KW: Your exhibition is called, A sky-licker relation. Where does the title come from?

OYH: The phrase ‘sky-licker’ comes from Aimé Césaire’s book-length poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). I first came across it when I read Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. My name in Chinese refers to an idiom or chengyu involving a bird cry, which is why I use birds as self-signifiers throughout my practice. A lot of my poetry involves flight or birds – there’s a promise of freedom and boundlessness.

Tell me about the new paintings for the show. Where did they begin and where do they land?

I tried to stay thematically cohesive with this body of work, even as it spans over a year of my life. And so I guess it began fourteen months ago, which is when I first started working towards the exhibition. At the time I was still a student, and I was trapped during lockdown in Liverpool, painting in a tiny room in my childhood home. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to return to New York to complete my degree. My life is very different now. This show has spanned much grief in my life, but also such joy and communion. I guess that’s where it lands – anew.

What role does symbolism play in your work?

At times in my work symbols signify people, like with astrological signs, zodiac signs, or tattoos. I signify myself as a bird throughout my work. I like polysemic symbols. I like using the star symbol because it can signify America when you render it in one context, but it also signifies socialism if you render it another. To give another example, I often dot my works with beads arranged circularly, which come from the Buddhist prayer hand bracelets I would often wear as a kid when I went to China. My parents would also often bring them home as souvenirs. They smelled of sandalwood and I’d wear them to school. I saw them as cute accessories, but they also became a symbol of my diasporic-ness. In my recent show at T293 in Rome I made a painting, Sphincter, aka Two-Pines, that referenced the potentially sphincteral nature of an elasticized beaded bracelet. It’s not to say that I like to decorate my paintings with assholes, but rather, to draw attention to the hidden, multiplicity of meanings a symbol can have. You can give symbols additional meanings by placing them in new contexts and relations. Symbols all dog-whistle differently. 
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[...]
Louis: But don’t you feel like that’s a bit of an eye roll, when you sense in someone’s work that it’s about having themselves be known? When people ask, ‘Oh, is that you?’ I’m like, ‘You really missed the point.’

Oscar: There’s always a danger of erring into solipsism when you’re painting your own world. But also, that’s all we ever do when we paint. If we paint someone else, we’re just painting ourselves in our relationship to that person.

I would say that what we’re doing is ‘minor art.’ Minor in the sense that, you know, we’re both queer. It’s not minority art, but art from people who are rendered minority. For example, women: Although they’re a majority, they’re considered a minority because of their lack of representation and power. A lot of minor art is about just giving testament to having survived and living a minor personhood.
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Oscar yi Hou, CC ‘20, paints people—not just as bodies, nor as the reduced, essentialized products of liberal identity politics, but people in all their complexity.

The first time I encountered yi Hou’s work was at one of Columbia’s end-of-semester undergraduate art shows. As always, the walls were jammed with artworks, Prentis’s winding hallways were teeming, and beneath the clamor of small talk, someone was playing soft music from the second-floor common room. Amidst the din, a large, dense, prismatic portrait painting caught my eye. Depicting a single figure swarmed by objects against a neutral canvas background, the painting drew me to its detailed, cryptic contents. Some months later, I would discover that it belonged to yi Hou, a queer British-Chinese artist from Liverpool.

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All art is identity-based, yi Hou argues, but in the history of the West, white male identities were simply and brazenly privileged over others. Rather than try to speak for his culture, or his ethnicity, or any other categories that constitute his identity, yi Hou makes art as a “testament”—to having lived as a particular person, to having experienced a complex personhood. In a world besieged with crises, he’s forced to grapple more deeply with his work’s meaning: why make this kind of art? “The answer,” he says, “is just that I’m testifying to having lived. And I think that’s a good thing in itself.”

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