Representation as curatorial framework is the great watchword of the contemporary art world. The generous interpretation of the cultural tumult declares that shows should be organized around this principle, which flattens an artist’s subjectivity to emphasize a singular aspect of their place in the world. Even at its best, representation does a disservice to both audiences and artists. Surely there are exhibitions structured around an imaginary marginalized other—an object-lesson rather than a fleshed-out artist. But as artist and critic Ajay Kurian suggests in a recent article in Cultured Magazine, “Measuring the political and aesthetic efficacy of an artwork is a fool’s errand; measuring it against curatorial claims or third-party theorizations of it is critically bankrupt.” Rather than focus on the ideologically-informed and equally flattening critiques of the neo-culture wars, it’s more interesting to examine how a new generation of artists is seeking to upend the visual strategies that have allowed this kind of instrumentalization through institutionalization. These artists’ material production allows for a messy ambivalence that confronts the machine of commodity from the position of a painter. This ambivalence in methodologies of form and subjectivity produces a representational agonism that resists stabilization, but doesn’t produce a cultural ideology of domination through competition. It sets a trap for those seeking an easy read, a representational gambit, or an identity-based dismissal. Painter Oscar yi Hou’s exhibition at James Fuentes, entitled “The beat of life,” is, in this logic, his own carefully laid-out minefield.

Yi Hou’s work tells us that there will be a hermeneutic in this personal history—a space in which the work, our own situatedness, and yi Hou’s own presence in the world, occupy the same interpretive circle. An MTV ontology: “You think you know… but you have (k)no(w) idea.” Paintings rendered through codices, portraits, and poetic fragmentation create typologies that suture the mythic and corporeal aspects of his subjects. Yi Hou’s paintings collapse the categories of observation into intimate studies replete with symbols and politico-visual markers. What is on view is not the didactic roadmap of how a person is to be seen, but a portrait of the relationship of interpretation yi Hou undertakes when sitting with himself or others for a render. Heavily encoded with symbols, glyphs, and numerology, yi Hou’s portraits are enigmatic: they contain both the cipher and decryption for his relationship with the subject, but that narrative is elusive to the viewer. He keeps something hidden or camouflaged behind something obvious, a strategic opacity that demonstrates an intimacy only yi Hou and his subjects can experience. But this ability to never fully understand that relationship is mitigated by the beauty of his work, producing a sumptuous compersion to our observational cuck.

Take the triptych Birds of Feather aka: Chinatown Gangsters in which yi Hou uses a visual analogy to make a portrait trifurcate into a study on Asian queerness. In this iteration of triple-aspect archetypic, the maiden, mother, and crone, transmute in its own temporal trinity of the queer painter; the bottom, the butch, the narcissist—three positions of self-portraiture that do not rely on gendered markers, but queer subject positions. In this work, portraits of himself and painters Amanda Ba and Sasha Gordon collapse the difference between the individual artists, who each wear the same nondescript suit. Instead of atomized portraiture, yi Hou presents an intense study of the relationships among the three artist-sitters. Each figure receives a panel, a sobriquet, and an astrological designation, but on its own each is incomplete without the others, depleted of aspects that make them a singular portrait.

For yi Hou, portraiture as political project is full of these closed loops that resist histories of simplistic documentation. It’s a project of creating dimension and narrative through tectonic clashes between popular culture and intimate politics. Yi Hou seems keenly aware of this responsibility in his work whether it falls on his own body or others. His ongoing series “Coolielisms,” named after the 19th century derogatory term for low-wage Asian laborers used by British colonial forces that were contracted to replace African slave laborers on sugar plantations, creates movable fictions where erotics, whiteness, and Asian popular culture writhe together over the canvas. But these aren’t works of seamless cohesion, but unlubricated grating, bodying forth a person and a fantasy of a person in the same image. In Coolieisms, aka: Born in the USA (Go and Kill the Yellow Man), 2023-2024, a brawny hip-cocked figure in blue handkerchiefed assless chaps and ass-long Manchu braid poses in front of a semblance of the American flag. The work is a retooling of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 titular album with a dubious nativist name, but now lasciviously homoerotic, reeking of violence and deviance. The painting nods to another feature of the history of the term “Coolie”: its phono-semantic matching of the original Hindi term in Mandarin as 苦力, translating to “bitter strength,” commonly used to mean “laborer.”

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.

Yi Hou often takes art historical references and styles into his work to further expand upon his relationships with the people he paints. In Sailor Moon Rising aka: Pacific Passenger, 2023, yi Hou is sampling from the visual language of the stunted sitting perspectives that Alice Neel often chooses along with the class and homoerotic thematic that Paul Cadmus employs in his queeny leering paintings of sailors cavorting. These two artistic motifs are just another layer of coding in which we can eke out a narrative about the person we see depicted in oil on the canvas and what the hand that rendered that codex wanted us to have. Sign. Signifier. Signed by the artist.

Yi Hou is perhaps most bare and plain-spoken in his painting when working with seriality. There is a suite of small claustrophobically close paintings of his friends and lovers, all hovering around 18 inches. While some of these paintings feature glyphs or objects of symbol, they are remarkably pared-back from the rest of his works—both in scale and in performative guise applied to the sitter. These works achieve an intimacy that the others do not have. In part, this is achieved through the same doleful honeyed-brown eye color shared by all the subjects, a trick that makes it seem as if all these gazes have penetrated the same person. But they also share a tantalizing aspect of appearing as though they are keeping themselves from feeling finished. In contrast to the adornment and encoding at work in most of yi Hou’s oeuvre, these works almost let us see the artist reflected in all those brown eyes, closer than ever before without the dressing of character. It is almost a self-portrait of the artist but only through the gentleness of each sitter’s gaze. If Emily Dickinson’s spider sought: “Of Immorality / His Strategy / Was Physiognomy,” so too do yi Hou's paintings reveal something outside the limits of our observation about the communion between him and his subjects.

These works triangulate between the sitter, the artist, and the audience where the people and objects depicted exceed the visual frame and corrode the relational dynamics we expect as interpretive schema. The trap of representational figuration is retooled by yi Hou as a method of defanging fetishization, messing with and undermining viewers’ assumptions about what they see. There are too many overlapping codes, too many historical signifiers, and too many particularities between artist and subject to be easily consumed and summarized as identity work. This is portraiture as dialectical critique: messy relationships, conflicting anti-heroes, sexual sublimation and desublimation, and, ultimately, about the friendships with these people that spill out beyond the canvas. We lucky viewers get to imagine that abundance for ourselves.