Queer artist Oscar yi Hou blends Asian and American imagery to explore ideas of migration, identity and belonging

Artist Oscar Hou Yiming was born and raised in Liverpool, England, but some of his most vivid childhood memories are of visiting his extended family in China’s Guangdong province. “It’s always sunny in my memory. I remember picking fruit with my grandfather, hanging out with my cousins,” he says. Hou, who works under the stylised name “Oscar yi Hou”, is speaking over Zoom from his studio in New York, where he moved in 2017 to study visual art at Columbia University. “I think it’s a very common diaspora thing – to have this idealised view of what your motherland is like,” he says. It is this sense of being caught between his family’s homeland and his own life in the West that Hou reflects in his vibrant paintings, which mix Chinese iconography with Americana to explore ideas of migration, identity and belonging. His portraits feature members of the Asian diaspora surrounded by a swirl of symbols that hint at their dual cultures, including sheriff’s stars, cowboy hats, yin-yang circles, mala beads, Chinese zodiac animals and red-crowned cranes. Hong Kong handover memories relived in 25th anniversary photo exhibition Many of his subjects are also queer, as is Hou himself, adding another layer to his depictions of people with myriad identities. Hou’s deft blending of East Asian and American imagery has brought him both commercial success and critical acclaim. He has had sold-out exhibitions in galleries in New York and Rome and, in October, will open his first solo museum show at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which recently awarded him its annual Uovo Prize. A museum show is a major achievement for any artist, but it is particularly impressive considering Hou’s age – he is only 23. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition, titled “East of sun, west of moon”, will feature at least seven new paintings directly inspired by items from the institution’s extensive Asian art collection. Hou has long been drawn to Western collections of East Asian artefacts, not just because they are a resource to learn about Asian cultures, but also in how they contribute to Western understanding – and stereotyping – of “Asianness”. In a new portrait of the Chinese-American artist Amanda Ba and her partner, titled Sayonara, Suzie Wongs, aka: Out the Opium Den (2022), Hou depicts the pair surrounded by a red-crowned crane, an ox and an unusual quatrefoil inspired by the shape of an ancient Chinese bronze plaque, one of a set of six dating back to the 10th century, that he discovered in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. He was also inspired by an 18th-century Japanese fan and a contemporary painting by Wang Fangyu, called Double Dragons (1990). I like forcing the viewer to avoid easy consumption of the person. They are human beings – there’s no way one image can do them justice Oscar yi Hou However, Hou has decided not to exhibit these historic items alongside his paintings. Instead, he plans to use wall text to explain to visitors which items from the museum’s collection appear in each of his pieces. “I spoke to the curator, Eugenie Tsai, and we agreed that it would be a nice way to invite the viewer to explore the rest of the museum,” he says. Hou first decided to remix ancient Chinese culture in his own work during one of his family trips to Guangdong in 2018, when he stumbled upon some calligraphy books. “When you’re part of the diaspora and you’re between two worlds, you have a very peculiar relationship to language. I can’t read Chinese, so the Chinese language itself became an object of fascination,” he says. He adds that he is also obsessed with American graffiti, and he has fused these two seemingly disparate sources of inspiration in his paintings. In doing so he has created illegible abstractions of both Chinese characters and English words, making language as impenetrable but visually striking as Chinese calligraphy remains to him. He incorporates these hieroglyphics into almost every painting he makes, but he has also made a series of entirely text-based works, titled Poem-pictures, in which he buries his own poetry beneath layers of ink. After finding those calligraphy books in 2018, Hou looked deeper into East Asian art history and discovered that his combination of poetry, calligraphy and painting was part of a long tradition in China and Japan. The disciplines were historically known as “the three perfections”, and a work that combined them was considered a masterpiece. “When I came across the concept, I was like, ‘Whoa, this is similar to what I do,’” he says. “It was never intentional, but I’ve realised it’s an instructive framework to follow.” Although Hou draws much of his inspiration from ancient art, his work remains rooted in the 21st century. Many of his sitters wear modern clothes and some of them hold iPhones. ‘My body’s a work of art’: bodybuilder/artist Lynus Woo on his twin passions Hou mostly paints himself and his friends, but he has recently begun depicting fictional characters to explore the identity of the Chinese diaspora at other moments in history. “I’m creating a series called Coolieisms,” he says, referring to the “coolie” labourers in the 19th century who were some of the first Chinese immigrants to the US. “In this series I’m tracing popular conceptions of what an East Asian man is.” He has already made paintings featuring the characters of Goku, from the manga series Dragon Ball, and Kato, who was played by Bruce Lee in the 1960s TV show The Green Hornet. Adeline Ooi, Asia director of Art Basel, on her ‘out of the blue’ life For the Brooklyn Museum show, he has created a new character who subverts the stereotype of the original Chinese coolies, who were mocked in American culture throughout the 19th century as feminine and deviant. Much of the ridicule was directed at the coolies’ “queues” – the long, braided hairstyle that was mandatory for men in China at the time. In Hou’s painting, the queue becomes a symbol of strength. His coolie resembles a beefcake model who holds his plait like a whip, turning the historic stereotype on its head. “I like forcing the viewer to avoid easy consumption of the person,” Hou says. “They are human beings – there’s no way one image can do them justice.” “East of sun, west of moon” by Oscar yi Hou, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. October 2022 – July 2023.