![]() 1998 in Liverpool, England lives and works in New York) received his BA at Columbia University, New York. Integrated yet abstract, yi Hou’s works describe a complex personhood and an ever-shifting sense of being alongside alienation: able to combine the two without collapse. Structurally, yi Hou’s practice can be seen as the artist’s own iteration of the Chinese tradition of the "Three Perfections”-the classical combination of poetry, calligraphy, and painting within a single visual work. ![]() Markedly intertextual, A dozen poem-pictures proposes such citation as an act of care, drawing out the relationship between literature and visual art. Some of the poems reference the work of other poets, such as Frank O’Hara and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or are written in response to the work of other artists, namely Martin Wong’s Saturday Night (1992). The gesture of rendering these poems opaque is inspired by Chinese calligraphy and the graffiti he encounters in New York City-both being styles of language that remain undecipherable to outsiders. Yi Hou’s many hidden poem-pictures speak queerly of intimate scenes of love, sex, labor, movement, water, smoke, sunlight, and wind (once again returning to the vision of a bird in flight). The result is a visual sense of transference between inner life and outer appearance, depositing affective and poetic residue in its wake. As the density of his ink marks permeate through the paper’s porous surface, yi Hou sinks his poetry into the page, sometimes thickly applying ink onto the back of the paper so that it seeps through to the front. Enacting a diasporic ‘burial of language,’ yi Hou de/recodes these symbols and pieces of text. Moving through the interstices of language as a diasporic subject, these new works on paper penetrate and further fragment yi Hou’s floating symbology and indecipherable text, continuing his sustained exploration into the impossibilities of translation. ![]() In A dozen poem-pictures, yi Hou opts to elaborate and fixate on this marginal space, depicting these symbolic inscriptions as subjects in themselves. While these symbols and text fragments typically drift among the subjects in yi Hou’s portrait works, adorning and complementing the people he paints, they are at their most salient when seen at the marginal edges of the canvas. Other symbols like a sheriff’s star, Chinese knots, and prayer beads are often seen floating alongside fragments of text-inscriptions that fuse English with Chinese calligraphy. Born in Liverpool, England to Cantonese immigrants, yi Hou's given Chinese name (一鸣) refers to a bird: an auspicious symbol that he reiterates throughout his practice as a stand-in for himself. Bringing together multiple levels of narrative, a world of detail can be found between recurring visual structures and symbols that carry with them diverse meanings. Oscar yi Hou deals with the complexity of identity through layers of iconography, symbolic reference, and personal relation within his works. James Fuentes is pleased to present Oscar yi Hou, A dozen poem-pictures on view through JamesFuentes.Online.
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