The Brooklyn Rail

Talk about signs and wonders. With his latest solo show, The beat of life, artist Oscar yi Hou presents an electrifying new body of work that, by the sheer vitality of the ideas it contains and the urgency of its subject matter, enthralls and eludes in the same breath. Incorporating signifiers and symbols steeped in queer erotics, the occult, and the artist’s own Asian heritage—think fetish gear, flaming yin-yang orbs, and sinuous Chinese calligraphy—yi Hou’s images are at once a reclamation of identity from the tropes of cultural marginalization and a refusal to submit to any easy categorization. If you’re in need of some revelation, look no further.

Sexuality looms large in The beat of life. Set against the backdrop of an American flag, the large-scale oil painting Coolieisms, aka: Born in the USA (Go and Kill the Yellow Man) (2023–24) portrays the muscled back of a man wearing assless leather chaps, jockstrap underneath, rendered with a sensuous vérité. Playing with the coded hypermasculinity of a Tom of Finland leather daddy is, for yi Hou, a means to destabilize a fetish culture that has historically worshiped the white, studly male at the exclusion of minorities. Similarly, Coolieisms, aka: The Geary Act’s Rough Trade (2023) riffs on the untamed virility of an archetypal male street hustler. Back turned, with a dragon tattoo snaking out from underneath his tight white muscle shirt, the image’s subject is invested with an air of heady machismo and eroticism, a rejection of the femininity often attributed to Asian men, whether gay or straight, by the West.

But, as queer theorist Leo Bersani argued in Homos, gay erotics is never just about sex, and in The beat of life this is palpably felt. Yi Hou’s “Coolieisms” series is an ongoing body of work interrogating the West’s construction of an Asian racial identity. With Born in the USA (Go and Kill the Yellow Man), yi Hou appropriates the album cover design of Bruce Springsteen’s ersatz nationalist anthem, incorporating the song’s racist lyrics “go and kill the yellow man” within the bars of the US flag, a very literal embedding of discrimination within the fabric of American identity. Meanwhile, The Geary Act’s Rough Trade conflates the exaggerated masculinity of the male sex worker with race-based carceral experience. The piece’s title and its prison-bar background refer to the discriminatory Geary Act of 1892, itself an extension of the xenophobic Chinese Exclusion Act, which allowed for the imprisonment of immigrants on the sole basis of their race. If this all begins to sound too familiar in the age of Trump’s racial politics, it should. Yi Hou’s images serve as a reminder that America’s history is founded upon the promise of opportunity at the cost of marginalization.

Exhibited alongside images charged with the politics of queer archetypes and racial disenfranchisement, The beat of life also features several intimate portraits, including Castro Comrade, aka: fourbird and Habibi, aka: If you surrendered to air, you could ride it (both 2024). In each painting, solo male figures gaze back at the viewer, their bare shoulders and chests conveying a vulnerability stripped of narrative artifice. By facing the viewer—a contrast with the turned backs of the “Coolieisms” subjects—and freeing them of the culturally layered and homoerotic signifiers deployed in the show’s other works, yi Hou invests his portraits with a symbolic nakedness, a compositional starkness that grants a degree of autonomy from the constraints of context. Yi Hou has spoken of his artistic practice as embracing a “being-with” mentality, a phenomenologically inflected approach to his subject which privileges the intimacy of the artist-sitter dynamic. As a result, his portraits have a striking naturalism, almost levity, that connects directly with his subjects’ humanity. Whereas other works in the show adopt an element of critique, yi Hou’s portraits are nothing less than tender celebration.

Among the show’s most arresting images is yi Hou’s Self-portrait (25), aka: The beat of life (2024), an autobiographical meditation by an artist who, already at his young age, has established a clear philosophical and visual worldview. Transforming oneself into the subject of a painting is nothing new, and yet yi Hou is able to engage the form with dramatic and surprising results. Incorporating numbers associated with his age and birthdate, along with fragments of his poetry and various symbols associated with Chinese cosmology, yi Hou’s self-portrait is—like his entire body of work—both a departure and invitation. A departure from the confined, demarcated thinking of past generations; an invitation for all of us to join him in doing the same.