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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, or you're live streaming or listening to this on-demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, musician Jason Mraz has a new album out and he'll give us a taste of it with a live performance in WNYC Studio 5. We'll learn more about the life of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh from biographer Stephan Talty.

This hour, it's a whole lot of art, indoor and outdoor. We'll talk to the artist and curator behind a massive crochet installation on display now in Madison Square Park, and we'll start this hour with a show at the Brooklyn Museum called East of sun, west of moon.

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A Brooklyn museum exhibition from an artist subverting racial and gender expectations consists of 11 large vivid paintings exploring Asian and Asian American identity, it’s titled East of sun, west of moon. In two galleries, there were bold, vibrant portraits of artists Oscar yi Hou and some of his friends that incorporate current and past references. Think of cowboy iconography mixed with leather fetish gear or manga characters and Chinese calligraphy.

In one of the first paintings you encounter yi Hou, yi Hou, correct? Depicts himself alongside two friends wearing cowboy hat surrounded by animals and stars. This piece is titled birds of a feather flock together, aka: A New Family Portrait. A New York Times review of the work states, “A self-described internet kid, Mr. yi Hou, has painted dense compositions with images and symbols tightly packed in a way that reflect the torrent of information he grew up processing intuitively.”

East of sun, west of moon is now an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum through September 17. Oscar yi Hou is a New York-based artist born and raised in Liverpool, however, he joins us to discuss. Oscar, nice to meet you.

Oscar yi Hou: Hi, nice to meet you. How are we going?

Alison Stewart: Going forward, we hope. Also joining us is Eugenie Tsai, a senior curator at the Brooklyn Museum and this is one of the last shows she's curating before leaving the museum after a wonderful 15 years. Eugenie, welcome to the show.

Eugenie Tsai: A pleasure to be here, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Oscar, excuse me, the show's title East of sun, west of moon comes from a poem you wrote, what is the poem about?

Oscar yi Hou: The poem essentially conjures up this mythic space of being in between these two huge celestial bodies, the sun and the moon seen as metaphors for the east and the west.

Alison Stewart: Would you read the poem for us? It's actually on the wall of the exhibition. I would love for people to hear it.

Oscar yi Hou: Yes. It's on the wall as part of the exhibition. Me and Eugenie talked about putting the actual poem onto the wall as an artwork into itself. The poem goes.

Is this on? Yes, fly too close.

You have everything to gain and only loftiness to lose.

In this intermediary puddle

Between those two great poles they staked out long before you were born

West of moon, all right, hold your breath, baited deep diving for crabs.

I remember now, you were never a strong swimmer

Knees deep staring the [unintelligible 00:03:32] body down

Against the walk and works of the reeds and tides as you wade further afield [unintelligible 00:03:40].

Alison Stewart: Eugenie, why did you think it was important to have the poem be part of the exhibition?

Eugenie Tsai: Well, in Oscar's work, although the paintings are extremely compelling, it was very clear from the start that poetry texts were as important a part of his practice. We talked a lot-- first of all, the title of the show is from the poem, as we mentioned, and we wanted to give the viewers a sense of the importance that poetry played in his work. We thought we'll put it on the wall like a painting, like a work of art and we discussed the font and how the font would differ from the labels, for example, so people wouldn't think it was the large label or something, but yes. I think very much in keeping with traditional Chinese art, painting calligraphy and poetry as the three legs on which art stands.

Alison Stewart: Oscar, why did you think it was important to have it be part of the show?

Oscar yi Hou: Actually, so I wrote a proposal for the show. When I first found out that I was supposed to write a proposal for the show, I was pretty overwhelmed at first. I didn't know what to do. Then I went into museum to think of some ideas, and then I came up with this poem and it just made sense. It drove the whole project of the show. It was very dear to my heart this poem because it spurred the whole enterprise, and it made a lot of sense for me just to include it as part of the show.

Alison Stewart: Eugenie, if you'd explain to our audience what this 3,000-word proposal was about and what was moving.

Eugenie Tsai: Yes, the 70-page proposal. It was--

Alison Stewart: 70, wow.

Eugenie Tsai: -yes, very impressive, and very erudite. I could have sworn an art history graduate student had written it. It was so thoughtful and so full of references to important critics, and art historians, and writers. It was very compelling in the sense of the intellectual underpinnings of the show, and also the works of art he included as examples of his work. This was something that we’d looked at as part of a process to award the UOVO prize, a prize, it recognizes exceptional emerging talent in the borough of Brooklyn. A panel of my peers were looking at this and it was very convincing

Alison Stewart: 70 pages, Oscar, oh my. [laughs].

Oscar yi Hou: Yes, it happens in a writing.

Eugenie Tsai: He actually wrote a [unintelligible 00:06:41] because it was so much.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious, when you started writing the proposal, did you anticipate, Oscar, that it would be 70 pages, or were you just moved? Was that just what was-- the muse came to you, and you just kept writing?

Oscar yi Hou: During the same time, I was also in the process of writing essays for a book that I published with my gallery, James Fuentes, on that press, James Fuentes Press. All these ideas were already fermenting in my head. Then when I found out that I was going to submit a proposal, I was already in a writing mood. I just kept flowing and a lot of the ideas from the book bled into the show proposal and vice versa. Yes, it was honestly a really nice time. It was like a month or two, just writing in my studio.

Alison Stewart: Oscar, practically speaking, what does a prize like this mean, for an artist? What does it allow you to do?

Oscar yi Hou: Oh, I mean, I'm so grateful, first and foremost, to UOVO and also Eugenie, as well. It was a huge game changer, especially, early on in my career to see firstly, my financial prize, and also to have an institutional show, and it gave me the opportunity to have such a show in such an amazing institution was such a dream come true. It's really hard to I guess overstate it. I feel incredibly privileged and happy. It definitely significantly altered the course of my career I think, so it’s been a huge privilege and a huge blessing.

Alison Stewart: Eugenie, in that proposal, what were some of the questions or points of discussions in Oscar's work? What did they bring up for you? What kind of questions? What kind of things that you thought, "Oh, wow, I'd like to think more about that, I'd like to explore more about that?”

Eugenie Tsai: Well, of course, I was only one person on the panel, but for me I had a personal connection. I really identified with Oscar as an artist to-- I was the child of immigrants, East Asian immigrants, although, I grew up in the Midwest, not in the UK. But the whole notion of identities and what it means to be Asian American in the United States, and I'm using that term very loosely because it is a very problematic term. Why in some ways, the term is necessary, but how it is very flattening and how it can’t capture the nuances of all of the diasporic individual communities that inhabit this nation and the world.

It was the first proposal that I recall that really addressed those issues and it seems so timely because of the- -way the spotlight had fallen on Asian Americans partially due to increased violence, I think a result of COVID and the belief that somehow COVID came from some lab in Wuhan. Also, I think the shooting in Atlanta, at the spa in Atlanta was a result of that, but also gave greater visibility to Asian American presence in the United States. It just seems so on the pulse, which is something that we're very interested in doing here at the Brooklyn Museum.

It also was a moment to-- Emerging is such an interesting term because emerging artist doesn't necessarily mean a young artist. It could mean an artist who's been working for quite some time whose work has not been recognized. But Oscar happened to be a very young artist who was clearly remarkably talented and who was producing this work that was very mature and very compelling. Everything was just-- it came together in in our reading of the proposal.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Oscar yi Hou, the artist, and Eugene Tsai, curator from the Brooklyn Museum. We're discussing Oscar’s show, East of sun, west of moon. It's at the Brooklyn Museum through September 17th. Oscar, you have allusions to a lot of popular culture in your paintings. How do you blend the references of pop culture with your practice as a fine artist?

Oscar yi Hou: I think the boundary between high and low visual culture, for me, it's very blurred and it's all the same. I think as an artist, as a visual worker, I'm looking at visual culture and that encompasses all aspects of visual culture. I watched anime growing up. I watched Dragon Ball Z, all those things as well as more things that are seen as lofty and high art for example. It makes sense for me to explore all facets of visual culture, especially when it comes to representation.

One of the pieces in the show is a portrait of myself dressed as Goku from Dragon Ball Z. I became really interested in Goku and anime as a kind of interface between the East and the West, specifically Japan post World War II, the ways in which Japan developed a really strong culture industry following its decline and then rise. The show is about East of sun, west of moon, the kind of between this and the meetings of these two things. I became interested in examining these forms of popular culture as a way to explore greater ideas between culture industries or, I don't know, geopolitical relations.

Alison Stewart: Eugenie, what's an example of a subtle reference of a pop culture moment in one of Oscar's works that maybe even took you a moment to register?

Eugenie Tsai: Sayonara, Suzie Wongs, aka: Out of the Opium Den. I realized that Oscar was referencing films from the ‘50s and ‘60s so that dates me, but I was unfamiliar with the specifics of the films. I was so interested, I went and looked up everything and the painting came to life in a different way. It already came to life but then I realized, oh my goodness, there's this whole other dimension that the title itself is referencing and that alludes to the American and Western presence in East Asia in an imperialistic way. That's one of the things I admire about his work, how much it is so much about the here and now, about his communities, about his friends, but also how it can open portals, offer portals to the history of East Asians in the United States.

Alison Stewart: How great is that, that you see something in a piece of art and it sends you down a whole trail of learning about something new?

Eugenie Tsai: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about East of sun, west of moon. It's at the Brooklyn Museum. We'll continue our conversation after a quick break, this is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. We're talking about the new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, East of sun, west of moon. My guests are Eugenie Tsai. She's a curator, and Oscar yi Hou, who is the artist. Oscar, a lot of the portraits feature people you know. How do you approach your friends about being part of your work?

Oscar yi Hou: That's a good question. I think sometimes I'll have a idea for a piece, oftentimes we based off a previous image, different artwork. Sometimes I think title of a work then I base the whole painting around the title. I tend to paint the same people over and over just because they are good friends of mine and they know how to do it and stuff. I guess that’s--

Alison Stewart: What do you mean, how to do it? [laughs]

Oscar yi Hou: They know how to pose, [unintelligible 00:15:58] being my studio. I actually don't know how to answer the question. I think it's very much based on intuition and feeling whether a person's going to make sense for a piece.

Alison Stewart: Is it easier for you because you do have-- we all have shorthand with our friends.

Oscar yi Hou: This is why I only work with my friends is because when I'm painting someone else, I want everyone to feel as comfortable as possible and to not feel transactional. It's based off our existing relationship. That's generally why I work with friends and close friends so it's a very comfortable environment to be in.

Alison Stewart: Eugenie, this is so interesting. If you're looking at one of the pieces, one of Oscar's pieces, and then on the wall text in the description, sometimes there'll be a small picture of some other piece of art or something from the museum's collection. It's such a great idea. Would you explain to our audience what that connection is?

Eugenie Tsai: Yes. Well, one of the things that Oscar did, people say, "Oh, did you commission Oscar to include works from the Brooklyn Museum in those paintings?" I said, "No." That's something that Oscar does on his own. He finds things online, museum websites and he happened to find some things in our collection. It's a way of his mix, I think you call it Chinese Cowboy Oscar, a mix of Western and Eastern iconography. It might be yin yang symbols or fake calligraphy or and in this case, you choose a very specific work of historical Asian art and render it quite accurately. It usually relates to the subject of the painting.

With your portrait of Sasha, your friend Sasha Gordon, the painter, you have this little jade pendant of a larger-- a mother figure, a little animal with its child and she’s in the painting holding her little dog. There's just that beautiful synergy between this individual in the flesh here and now and then this little historical pendant. I don't know. I just love the way all of the different references you bring in add to the content and the painting.

You mentioned the word citational when you talk about your paintings and I think that's so appropriate. It's one of the ways-- something that really distinguishes your work from the resurgence of figuration in general. It's figurative work, they're portraits, but then there's all this additional text or symbols and the work of art from a traditional work of art that add meaning to it and take the viewer off in different directions.

Alison Stewart: Is that piece the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, aka: Bushwick Bleeding Hearts Club 2022?

Oscar yi Hou: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I took a picture of it because I thought it was it was so great.

Oscar yi Hou: Yes and the object I reference is two tigers in reference to me and Sasha both being Year of the Tiger in our Zodiac.

Alison Stewart: Tiger and Cub, China late 18th century, early 19th century Nephrite Jade. Go figure.

Oscar yi Hou: I guess whole body of work, I've always been looking at the past and looking at these objects within Asian art collections. I guess from a diasporic perspective experiencing my "ancestral culture" so to speak, from these Western- -institutions. It made sense when I found out that I could be doing this Brooklyn Museum show to incorporate Asian objects within the Brooklyn Museum collection just to make it a bit more site-specific.

Alison Stewart: Oscar, these paintings are large.

Oscar yi Hou: Yes.

Alison Stewart: They're very, very big. How does scale play into your work?

Oscar yi Hou: It really varies. A lot of the figures are actually similar size. Generally, the face is just smaller than the span of my hand. That's how I measure around [unintelligible 00:20:34].

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Oscar yi Hou: But there's one painting in the show, for example, Old Gloried Hole, aka: Ends of Empire, which is a markup of the American flag and that's seven feet tall, almost seven feet tall. I wanted that to really have this huge sense of scale. I wanted to produce some more monumental work for the show and obviously have all the vertical lines of the flag, we have the figure in the bottom right and the shadow being cast. That's a piece where I was very specifically thinking about scale and size and the sense of meaningness.

Alison Stewart: Eugenie, when you think about the size of the paintings, the scale of the paintings, how does that impact the way the show is organized, the way you think about it and you think about your visitors to the museum experiencing it?

Eugenie Tsai: Well, I always think of Oscar as having several modes. Some of the paintings, for example, the paintings that are paintings of himself, but not self-portraits, i.e. the Kato and the Goku I think of as small and intimate, and even the Sasha is more on the intimate scale and so you come up close. Those works draw you in. You want to look at every single detail. Although I have to say that I think all of Oscar's work have a near far read but I think Old Glory Hole-- Gloried Hole is an example of a work that has a great far read, but then a very different close read. That definitely, as Oscar said, was the largest and intended to be in some ways the centerpiece of that gallery.

In fact, Oscar was away while we were hanging it. We FaceTimed him and he said, "Oh, put it up a little bit higher." We did that because he said, "I want it to loom over the viewers," which is very interesting because generally, I think of his work as not that-- looming implies some sort of domination and I don't think of Oscar's work in that way. The exhibition was organized and it was organized with Oscar because when you're working with an artist, it's always a collaboration. The work seemed to fall very naturally into two bodies. The first one was friends and chosen family, and the second smaller gallery in the back was portraits or representations of the artist in different performative modes. There were two very large paintings face-to-face, and then the two smaller ones face-to-face. It worked out, I thought, beautifully.

Alison Stewart: Oscar, yes, there was a--

Eugenie Tsai: Then the poem was between the two galleries, situated between the two. It was a very, very conscious hang, of course, Oscar's brilliance showing through.

Alison Stewart: Oscar, you are in a few of the paintings. There's a piece where you're shirtless and you're wearing a cowboy hat and you have a mask like Zorro. What is it like to paint an image of yourself as compared to others?

Oscar yi Hou: It's actually very boring. It's very iconical. I painted myself a lot because self-representation is one thing, but it's also very convenient. I don't have to schedule someone to come in. I just compose myself in the most grotesque poses possible. I can strip myself down. I can very much manhandle myself. There's that protocol of care that I feel like I have to do when it's myself. That's why with that body of work, you have this pinup beefcake figures in a way that they're sexualized. I feel comfortable doing to a figure that isn't based off anyone in particular. It's more reference of myself because it feels like I can just manipulate my own likeness in a way that I just care less about whether it looks like me.

Alison Stewart: People who are listening can hear your accent. You were born in Liverpool. How does your Englishness, I don't know what the right language to use is, factor into this show at all if it does?

Oscar yi Hou: Well, I think I'm not from America. When I came to the States, I came for college, I was very much aware of Americanness. I didn't take it for being the standard. It was something else, something new that I had to counter and learn about. Coming at it from an outside perspective, I became really interested in America as an object of studying and became really fascinated with it. I think a lot of my work actually deals with Americanness and not really Britishness I think because I was really interested in America and the American project as an outsider.

Alison Stewart: Where do we see that, Eugenie, in this show, his curiosity?

Eugenie Tsai: Certainly in the mix of iconography and in his work. I think his work really captures the iconography and the sense of in-betweenness of being between cultures is I think something that is captured quite effectively in his work through. I'm trying to identify exactly, aside from the mix of iconography, how he achieves that. I think it has to do with the sense really of the here and now and being, for example, in Brooklyn in 2020-- we're in 2023, some of the paintings are 2022, but there's just that sense of being up to the moment in costume, in references, visual references.

Alison Stewart: Eugenie, before we wrap, I did want to acknowledge your 15 years at the Brooklyn Museum is coming to an end.

Eugenie Tsai: Such a wonderful last show I have to say. It makes me very happy-

Alison Stewart: That this is your last show?

Eugenie Tsai: -to have been working with Oscar on this last show.

Oscar yi Hou: It's been a real pleasure, Eugenie, and a privilege.

Alison Stewart: Is there anything that you are particularly, aside from this show, it’s a wonderful show, it should be your last show, a moment in your career at the Brooklyn Museum that you are particularly proud of?

Eugenie Tsai: I can't say any one moment. It's been a wonderful privilege to work at the museum to help build the collection and to present exhibitions to an amazing public. It's a fabulous institution and I've loved every minute of being here.

Alison Stewart: Well, here's to your next adventure. We wish you all good things.

Eugenie Tsai: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Everyone, you can see Eugenie Tsai's last curated show, East of Sun, west of Moon at the Brooklyn Museum through September 17th. My guests have been curator, Eugenie Tsai, and artist, Oscar yi Hou. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Eugenie Tsai: A pleasure.

Oscar yi Hou: [unintelligible 00:27:55] Alison.

 

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