Last week, the artist Oscar Yi Hou was admiring a 3D self-portrait by Juliana Huxtable. The piece hadn’t yet been hung—it rested on the floor, still wrapped in plastic—but Huxtable’s figure was already commanding: thigh-high crimson boots, reptilian skin, and outstretched bat wings.
“It’s about power and hybridization,” Yi Hou said. “It’s kind of furrycore, but it specifically looks at the idea of the cyborg—the breakdown of boundaries between animal and human.” He paused and asked, “And what does that show about contingencies around race and gender as well?”
Juliana Huxtable, (2019). Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York, and Los Angeles.
Yi Hou was at the Tribeca gallery James Fuentes. Though closed to the public, it was buzzing with activity as a squad of art handlers unpacked and installed the works for the new group show “Deviations.” Known as a breakout star on the gallery’s roster, the 26-year-old Yi Hou takes on a new role here—as curator. It followed his first exhibition with the gallery in 2021, shortly after he graduated. There, nearly 70 percent of the works in that first exhibition were acquired by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Historical Society, and Grinnell College. “Most artists wait a lifetime for that level of institutional support,” said James Fuentes, the gallery’s namesake founder.
His solo show “The Beat of Life,” held this past November, was a runaway success. “We could have sold the show out 20 times over,” Fuentes said. Its centerpiece—, a triptych featuring himself and his friends the artists Amanda Ba (a classmate at Columbia) and Sasha Gordon—was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum.
The current exhibition, curated by the artist, brings together 12 artists—all of whom identify as queer or trans. “It wasn’t intentional,” Yi Hou said. “They’re just my friends.” Fittingly, the exhibition feels like a natural extension of his practice: Yi Hou’s specialty is portraits of intimates and those in his expanded social orbit. His paintings often layer this contemporary closeness with historic and symbolic depth, incorporating East Asian motifs—dragons, flaming pearls, Chinese characters, and other symbology. On view through May 7, the show features artists like James Bantone, Nash Glynn, recent Guggenheim fellow Martine Gutierrez, Sam Penn, and Yi Hou himself.
Cameron Patricia Downey, (2025). Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York and Los Angeles.
We walk by Cameron Patricia Downey’s absurdist wicker-back chair sculpture. Its steel base is elongated so dramatically that it must lean against the wall like a ladder. It is a standout piece. “The seats in the show are unusable,” Yi Hou said. “It’s about the idea that a body could be there, but it very much could not. It’s the illusion of function.”
He motioned to Ser Serpas’s looming sculpture that melds a weightlifting bench, a cracked rear windshield, and a hulking, dilapidated 1980s treadmill. Sometimes, Serpas’s sculptures can present an initial strangeness that borders on comical, but the kitsch of outdated detritus quickly gives way to something more apocalyptic. (Serpas’s largest solo show to date, “Of my life,” opens at Kunsthalle Basel in June.) “It was fun to assemble,” Yi Hou said. “Just seeing the typeface and design, all this residue… It’s seen better days. Although actually, I’d say now, it’s in its best days—as an assemblage.”
An installation view of “Deviations” Photo: New Document. Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York, and Los Angeles.
The painter Michael Stamm layered a still life of a vessel with a Fire Island Pines sunset vignette in . It might seem a quaint juxtaposition, but hints of pharmacological excess are overlaid as well. “The ones who get it will get it,” Yi Hou said. “This is about our island. It’s alluding to chemical pleasure in a queer context. I’ve become friends with a lot of the artists here in places of pleasure, like parties or raves.”
There is a distinct native nightlife element to the assembled artists—all roads seem to lead to Basement. I’ve crossed paths with most of them at the Ridgewood techno club; Huxtable is also a highly skilled DJ and sometimes plays there. Langberg showed a selection of nightclub paintings at Victoria Miro in London last year—including the work (2023), which captures a scene on the dancefloor. Yi Hou makes a cameo appearance in that painting and the club’s cofounder, Téa Abashidze and a swath of regulars were at the vernissage. “It’s an important space,” Yi Hou said, “socially and culturally. A lot of people converge there.”
“There’s a blurred boundary between one’s professional artistic life and their hedonistic life—or the life they lead outside their career,” Yi Hou said. “For me, it’s one and the same. I don’t differentiate between my professional life and my personal life. The people I’m friends with are consistent across these different worlds. There’s a kind of correspondence between how people are in a club setting or a rave and how they are outside of that.”
Oscar Yi Hou, (2025). Courtesy of James Fuentes.
Fuentes said it felt “intuitively right” to offer him to curate an exhibition. “Oscar is the artist who most consistently brings other artists to my attention,” he added.
We stand in front of Yi Hou’s piece, which is a portrait of the artist Emilio Tamez; this isn’t the first time he’s depicted her. “She’s a muse in many ways,” Yi Hou said. “She’s very beautiful. I find it hard not to paint her.” Tamez is rendered in a fur coat and pensively looks away from the viewer, her expression hard to gauge.
This show is threaded with codes—insider references, unknown connections and histories, and hidden signals shared among friends. Across the room, Tamez—glamorous in a camisole and jeans—was assembling her piece . “There’s the let-go of surrender—but also a white-knuckle kind of grip that comes right before it,” she explained. The color-saturated photograph shows her standing before a dying tree, her face obscured by flowing white garments, arms outstretched as if summoning some invisible force.
Emilio Tamez, (2024–2025). Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York and Los Angeles.
“Everyone was keeling over,” she said of the ten-hour, overnight shoot in London’s Primrose Hill, “but I kept waiting for the wind. Finally, it came—and that was the last frame I shot.” Mounted on birch, the piece holds more secrets. Tamez pressed her own blood onto the wood, leaving faintly visible handprints around the edges. “I went to Catholic school—maybe you can tell from the nature of my work,” she said. “I have a lot of prayers I use while I’m working, and one of them is: ‘I wish to see the innocent and forgiven world. Amen.’” The line is scratched into the wood, hidden beneath the print.
The artist Oscar Yi Hou. Photo: Clifton Mooney. Courtesy of the artist.
“Oscar’s post-academic community is encapsulated in this show,” said Fuentes. “The conceptualization and what it’s putting out there, is feeding into the development of the work he’s doing in the studio now—it’ll culminate in his next show.” Yi Hou offers a hint of his next steps. “I’m working toward a new series,” he said. “I think it’s going to be called ‘Night Crawling.’ You can deduce what you will from that.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
