Oscar yi Hou

"East of the Sun, West of the Moon": A Poetic Journey Through Oscar yi Hou's Latest Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum.

PAINTINGS BY OSCAR YI HOU | TEXT BY TYLER AKERS | PORTRAITS BY ABI BENITEZ

 “Cowboy Kato Coolie, aka: Bruce’s Bitch” (2021).

A show of new paintings by Oscar yi Hou is on view at the Brooklyn Museum for nearly a year through mid-September of 2023. East of the Sun, West of the Moon, the exhibition’s title, refers to a poem by the artist that riffs on the feeling of in-betweenness and the innumerable stereotypes of East Asian people in Western cultural imagination. In yi Hou’s brushy, expressive portraits, the artist costumes himself and friends as a spectrum of characters — from Bruce Lee’s role of Kato on the 1960s television show The Green Hornet and anime Dragon Ball’s Son Goku to Old Hollywood “geisha-girls” and Spaghetti Western cowboys. He then builds painterly frameworks around his figures, centering them against a spare architectural scene.

The compositions, reminiscent of symbolic quincunxes and coronas around saints, are then embellished with an intersectional mix of floating icons and symbols (including references to Japanese and Chinese artworks from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.) These marginalia feature creatures like butterflies and cranes, sometimes swooping to overlap Chinese calligraphy or graffiti tags, motifs like Internet symbols and Taoist taijitu, stars from flags or sheriff’s badges.

Oscar Yi Hou photographed in Brooklyn, N.Y. September 2022.