Artist/Maker
Oscar yi Hou
(b. 1998)
Far Eastsiders, aka: Cowgirl Mama A.B & Son Wukong
2021
Oil on canvas
Overall: 61 × 49 3/8 in. (154.9 × 125.4 cm)
Purchased through the generosity of Nancy Newcomb and John Hargraves
2022.2
Oscar yi Hou is a New York-based artist whose work explores the complexities of identity—particularly those of traditionally marginalized groups like the queer and Asian diasporic communities. As he describes it, his practice is “a testament to…a life lived in the marginal and the minor.”
The title of this painting calls attention to the Asian communities of New York—to the Far Eastsiders who live in the Far Eastsides (analogous to the Westside and Eastside) of the city. Those pictured here are personal friends of the artist. yi Hou seats the man on the woman’s lap to queer the gender dynamic between the figures. He further emphasizes the woman’s dominance by identifying her, in the title, as “Mama” and her partner as a “Son.” Son Wukong is a play on words. It is a variation of Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King—a legendary figure in the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, who appears as a tattoo on the man’s arm.
The hat worn by the woman transforms her into a Chinese cowgirl. This, along with the Chinese cowboy, forms a common motif across yi Hou’s work. He associates East Asians with a quintessential symbol of the American Old West in order to draw attention to the ways in which Chinese immigrants—who were an integral part of that West, particularly through their labor building the Transcontinental Railroad—have been written out of frontier mythology. Consider, for example, that Chinese laborers were explicitly excluded from period photographs marking the historic meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory, Utah, in 1869.
The Asian cowboy is also an homage to one of yi Hou’s inspirations: Martin Wong, likewise a queer Chinese artist who lived and worked in New York City and who was known for wearing cowboy shirts and a Stetson hat. As yi Hou understands it, Wong’s manner of dressing served to explode the myth of the white cowboy. As he explains, “It’s almost performing a kind of drag—a gay yellow guy play-pretending as a cowboy, inhabiting this mythical white figure. By playing dress-up, by donning the cowboy hat to almost basterdise its very integrity, it…shows the fictitious nature of the myth itself.” The brickwork in the background of Far Eastsiders is a further tribute to Wong, who painted many reddish-brown bricks in his renderings of the Lower East Side, where he lived. The older artist’s initials (“M.W”) in face appear on one of the bricks in the upper right corner of the painting.
Wong’s initials form the only legible text in the composition. The rest is abstracted. Typically, yi Hou renders English words vertically and cursively like Chinese calligraphy, and then abstracts them into purely aesthetic form. As the artist explains, these markings serve as a commentary on his own identity as a person of Cantonese descent who cannot read or write Chinese: he wanted to create a hybrid script expressive of the simultaneous sense of familiarity and estrangement he feels when he sees the language.
SignedSigned and dated on back.
ClassificationsPAINTINGS
Collections
- Painting Highlights
- Recent Acquisition Highlights
