GAYLETTER

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. The illuminations contextualize their sitters as much as they obfuscate them, pointing to the rich complexity of the painter’s relationship with each subject and the ways in which constructed, long-standing identities may be adopted and rebuffed.

The show developed from a detailed 3000-word proposal yi Hou wrote, gathering many of his ideas from previous exhibitions and emphasizing the importance of pairing text with image, a central touchstone in understanding the re-appropriation at play in his work. …

Artist Linus Borgo is no stranger to periods of incubated change — over a decade ago he was involved in an electrical accident, resulting in the amputation of his left forearm and hand. In the hospital, he remembers the feeling of being a mere body, passed from one doctor to the next. Now, years later, he paints from his home and studio in Brooklyn, dissolving and reconstituting memories into potent compositions. These heightened visions and flashbacks exist somewhere between the corporeal and metaphysical, between dream and nightmare.

The painter credits his dance background and artists of the Italian Renaissance as having paved much of the territory on which he treads. “There’s a lot of choreography in paintings of the Renaissance,” he laughs, “and all those muscular bodies painted in the Sistine Chapel — many people were there to have a religious experience, I was just turned on.” Using thickly lain oil paint, Borgo extends the humanist traditions of Renaissance painting with an elegant attention to form and by grounding the work in his own personal experience.

“Sometimes I worry I am making trauma porn,” Borgo confesses. Memory is reductive; in our minds it flows, without bearing the broad monotony of time and place, charged by the lingering effects of elation and suffering that militate even our smallest experiences. As many of Borgo’s paintings are laden with the anguish and upheaval he once felt, they also might empower the viewer, reassuring them that the passing of time, no matter how slow it may feel, will inevitably change all circumstances. …

Fantasia Royale Gaga is many things, a showgirl, a Sagitarrius, and the season one winner of Out TV’s Hot Haus. Originally hailing from Jacksonville, for nearly a decade, “The Body” as she’s known has been perfecting her act down in Miami, a mainstay at Palace Bar in South Beach, which is also where she posed for us oceanside. She was on a birthday trip in Puerto Rico, however, when Brooklyn’s Chiquitita called her up for a heartfelt chat about a year of leveling up, early role models for transness, and how she’s navigated requiring respect from her family.

Hi, how are you? I’m good. How are you doing?

I’m good. Do you remember me by the way? [Laughs] We met at C’mon Everybody in Brooklyn. I was telling you that I stole something from you, and you said, “You stole something from me?” I was like, “I did.” And I pulled out this pink rhinestone. Do you remember? Oh my gosh, yes, yes, yes. Because they had fallen off my costume [Laughs]. I do, I do.

Oh my God. It’s good hearing from you. How is Puerto Rico? We are enjoying ourselves a lot over here. It’s my first time in Puerto Rico.

What made you wanna go to Puerto Rico for your birthday? Well, originally I was supposed to go to Paris again, so those plans failed. Then I was supposed to go on a cruise with some of my friends and they all booked their cruise. …

Michael Chang’s second full-length collection of poetry, Almanac of Useless Talents, will be published by Clash Books this fall. It follows last year’s Boyfriend Perspective (Really Serious Literature) and anticipates next year’s Synthetic Jungle (Northwestern University Press). In just a few short years, Michael’s body of work has earned wide recognition for being fun, smart, and hot. In addition to writing, they are a poetry editor at Fence, a renowned journal for fiction, art, criticism, and poetry. In Almanac of Useless Talents, Michael’s language shifts every line break and page turn, spanning bodega wear and bespoke couture, the plainspoken and the algorithmic. Skeptical, curious, and playful, Michael’s “gutter poetry / for dirty minds” prefers differentiation to interpretation. What emerges is a book that compels you to take stock of life and still laugh, but also get romantic — “hang out on a cloud with u : / somewhere undisturbed & unfound / the two of us : there : unmarked : / not blinking at all : / no one ever treat u so right.” This spring, we spoke with Michael about their new book, gilded things, and being there for people.

Almanac of Useless Talents begins with quotations from the late poet John Ashbery (“Silly girls, your heads full of boys”) and singer Sufjan Stevens (“Terrible sting, terrible storm / I can tell you”). What do these two bring to the table for you? I think they’re very complementary. It was fun to think of the two of them together. …

Games are often used as metaphors for life. Whether recreation or competition, they condition players to enjoy the buzz and endure the struggle, to brave the painful upset of loss and savor the short-lived exhilaration of winning. Captivated by this rise and fall, Brooklyn-based artist Luke O’Halloran is interested in the sport and symbols of risk, chance, and possibility. From infinitely spinning slot machines to flurries of playing cards thrown into the air, his work often freezes fleeting moments in a blur of movement. But there are quieter examples too. Featured here, O’Halloran’s pencil-drawn portraits show scenes of friends building houses of cards, each filled with a sense of mounting tension that signifies the fragility of life.

“It is impossible to pose them, and I don’t interrupt or ask for a pause,” O’Halloran explains. He doesn’t stage the scenes either. Instead, he spreads a deck of cards out on a table and lets the sitter begin building while he snaps reference photos. In these tableaux, the subjects seem suspended in trance-like superposition, imagining a range of possibilities as they delicately select placements. Focus and finesse are key, and commitment to each moment must be unwavering, or the cards will fall. Once translated into drawings, the resulting portraits are gracefully understated. Each balances an economy of careful lines with tight details scrupulously inscribed through spare hatch marks, exacting the defining features and gestures of each participant with a pared-down complexity.

“Liz & Kenny building a house of cards” (2022). …

While their spectral iridescence is reminiscent of gasoline splashed on pavement or the psychedelic images made by infrared cameras, Caitlin Cherry’s recent paintings are actually inspired by a phenomenon of glitching LCD screens. A few years ago, Cherry noticed that when looking from the side, at a slant, the colors on her laptop screen would begin to invert, a process better known to photographers as solarization. Depending on the adjusted level of color distortion, a figure with brown skin appearing a shade of deep orangey bronze might flip, changing to the hue most its opposite on the color wheel, an alienoid blue. Translating pixels into paint, Cherry experimented with imitating this inversion, developing the signature kaleidoscopic style that characterizes her portraits of Black women, many of them luminaries like Cardi B. and Dominique Jackson. The effect is a visual dissonance, the chaotic layering of multiple disagreeing lenses, offering an expressionistic line up of pop culture provocateurs who have helped redefine femininity and the limits of self-transformation. “Black women have never sat comfortably in an idea of what female-ness is,” the Richmond-based artist asserts, “Even if they don’t realize, they are playing by a set of queer politics.”

Cherry often pulls her source material from the latest movies, TV, music videos, award shows, and social media. “I’m frantically archiving because the pace of culture has sped up,” she laughs, “the overturn is quicker than it used to be.” She is interested in the noise of niche celebrity culture — fleeting, marginal fame, people becoming commodities, perpetual social performance — how tech trends seem to be establishing a broad landscape of new role models, resulting in a less streamlined sense of normal or natural. …

Michael R. Jackson used to work as a Broadway usher mere blocks away from where his new musical, A Strange Loop, is running at the Lyceum Theater. His show, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical, was in development for 18 years, and what began as a one-person monologue gradually evolved into a full musical production. After garnering rave reviews during its Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, winning a Pulitzer for drama in 2020, and attracting a star-studded roster of producers, like Jennifer Hudson, Alan Cumming, and RuPaul (to name a few), A Strange Loop opened on Broadway in April 2022.

Jackson is from Detroit, Michigan, and came to New York City as an undergrad to study playwriting at NYU. To walk down 7th Avenue with him now is surreal, in part because of the ubiquity of banner ads for A Strange Loop. Look down every single street near Times Square and you’ll see them fluttering overhead, purple and orange, like a fabulous series of sunsets right above the traffic. As we weave around tourists and taxis, I ask if he’s used to the feeling yet of seeing his work celebrated like this, he replies, “used to?” and chuckles to himself.

A Strange Loop is about Usher, a big Black queer Broadway usher who’s about to turn 26. Usher is writing a musical about a Black queer Broadway usher named Usher who’s writing a musical, and finds himself caught in a series of loops born of his own self-perceptions. …

Valentin Amour doesn’t want to be pinned down — figuratively, at least. Born in a small town near the west coast of France, the 29-year-old was trained as a ballet dancer until shirking the art form in their early twenties. Any who have recently encountered the performer through social media, Onlyfans, or scenes for Lucas Entertainment will understand that Amour’s appeal requires little explanation. With a penchant for jockstraps and an ever-arched back, they’ve captured the attention of hundreds of thousands.

The theatrical moniker “Valentin Amour” is a marriage between the performer’s given name, Valentin, and their pseudonym “Amour” — chosen with help from their mentor, Austin Wolf. Beyond its ring, Amour was drawn to the the name for its campy allusions to sex and romance and representation of Amour’s heritage.

Despite the relatively conservative climate in which they were raised, as a child Amour was free to express their sexuality. Like many, they found joy in playing dress-up with their mother’s frocks, fashioning makeshift nails, and dancing ballet. After taking weekly classes in their hometown, they attended a boarding school and later a conservatory for dance in their early teens. At 20, after completing a masters in contemporary dance, they joined a professional ballet company with a focus on modern techniques like Martha Graham. However, Amour’s ballet career was short-lived. After one year dancing professionally, they felt bored by the discipline’s petty politics and quickly left ballet.

In the years that followed, they found their footing as a porn star. …

It is impossible to ignore Ocean Vuong’s accolades: He’s won a MacArthur Genius Grant, a Whiting Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and in 2019 his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was long-listed for the National Book Award while spending several weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. His lyrical name is recognized outside of the literary circuit. Only so many authors are; many of them dead. That is to say, Ocean is not in the company of many contemporaries. While the ‘public intellectual’ has been called an endangered species, Ocean is one of the few we have writing today. This is more surprising given his lack of a Twitter presence, where writers often gain popularity for pontificating on anything and everything. Still Ocean, earning continued praise for his deft craftsmanship, is rarely far from the literary conversation. He is a writer’s writer — most comfortable at his desk, mulling over the pliability and banality of language.

Ocean broke out in 2016 with his debut collection of poetry Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press).. He enjoyed critical success and more. Fashion magazines, fashion brands, and even Netflix came knocking. Ocean, his star-ascendant, has made, and is making, poetry cool again.

Time Is A Mother, Ocean’s second collection of poems, arrives at a very different moment. While she lived long enough to see her son’s phenomenal success, in November 2019, Ocean’s mother passed away. She figures prominently in his first books as the central pillar of his matriarchal, immigrant family. …