SIREN: Yongseok Oh
Your Beautiful Subjectivity
An art critic once said that gay art, or what he calls homoart, can be broadly divided into two lineages: that of Priapus and that of Adonis. To claim that these two mythic figures sum up the history of gay art is, of course, an exaggeration. It can only be accepted with several qualifications. When modern society began to group same-sex intimacy and desire as a distinct category, a sexual population of its own, and when people started to struggle to understand and experience themselves through that category, we can say that they began to look for figures that could represent their fantasies.
Only with the arrival of the modern era can we say that Priapus, the embodiment of masculine desire and strength, and Adonis, the figure of androgynous beauty of feminine beauty in men, became recurring sources of homosexual fantasy. Of course, they did not have to be Priapus or Adonis. Many other mythic figures could take their place. And since the late twentieth century, after the emergence of a modern gay society, there has been no need to rely on such mythic figures at all. On shopping bags from the clothing brand Abercrombie and Fitch, easily found in American malls and busy shopping streets, we can readily encounter photographs by Bruce Weber. These images may well be the standard homoerotic icons of our time. They show dazzlingly beautiful young men from California, watched by a camera filled with homosexual desire.
Yet to receive these photographs as sensual and alluring, we must first recall the images created by the legendary mail-order photo magazines of the 1960s, commonly known as Physique Pictorial. These magazines offered male nude photographs that quietly staged scenes from classical myths. The men in these images reenacted Priapus or Adonis. This staging may have been a disguise to conceal homosexual desire, or a carefully arranged scene designed to provide a shared stage for homosexual fantasy among its viewers. In Bruce Weber’s photographs, however, we can no longer find traces of imagery that refers back to ancient myth.
Nonetheless, if we look a little more closely, we can see that these images are mediated by historical practices that visually represented homosexual desire. Weber’s photographs no longer show wrestlers or beautiful youths from ancient rituals and myths. Instead, they present surfers enjoying windsurfing under the bright Californian sun. Yet for Weber’s photographs to exist at all, the homoerotic staging of male nude photography from earlier periods is essential. In this sense, Weber’s work is not homosexual simply because it offers a gaze fixed on sensual, shirtless young men. His photographic imagery can function as a screen onto which homosexual desire is projected because it imitates the homoerotic staging of male nude photography from the past.
Yongseok Oh’s paintings may also belong within this trajectory of fantasy. When homosexual desire remains locked inside a purely private subject, when it stays undefined as a personal fantasy, it can turn into madness. For this reason, those who live with homosexual desire cannot avoid fixing that desire as an extension and expression of some identity to which they belong. Otherwise, one would be loving a particular person of the same sex by chance, not loving qualities understood as shared by the same sex. This is why shaping homosexual desire into a shared form, rather than letting it fall into limitless private obsession, can be seen as the primary task of all gay art. In order not to lose one’s mind, and in order to declare that this desire exists beyond the self and circulates within the world, gay artists have always turned their desire into an imitated desire, a desire directed toward something that already exists.
This is why gay art, grounded as it is in imitative desire, can become ordinary art. That is not a criticism. What do you see in David Hockney’s paintings. When we look at his major works from the 1970s such as 《Man in Shower in Beverly Hills》 or 《Portrait of an Artist》, we can trace private biography and project a sense of melancholy identification. Whether or not the viewer knows that these paintings narrate Hockney’s personal relationships and emotions with his lovers, Peter, Gregory, or Ian, and the blonde young men he loved, the paintings become gay through the gaze of the viewer, at least a gay viewer, and are turned into icons. Yet, as we know, Hockney was also known as a master and alchemist of modern painting, driven by a passion to break away from and constantly transform the rules of iconic representation.
We are thus faced with two Hockneys that seem impossible to reconcile. One is Hockney as an artist who turns gay desire into images. The other is Hockney as a modern artist who is anti-iconic and even anti-representational. I believe a similar double identity of the gay artist can be found in Yongseok Oh’s work. From the series titled 블로우 업(Blow Up), to the 파우누스(Faunus) series, and further to 실마리를 찾아서(In Search of a Clue), we see the artist as a viewer who collects and imitates gay artists or gay icons. These include stylized forms from Western gay pornography, figures like Joey Stefano, and even Faunus, cited as a mythic figure that personifies gay desire.
But how should we understand the desire that organises this drive toward iconic representation? If we return once more to Hockney, why did he have to paint his lover Peter showering in the bathroom that way. What determines his painterly style, the famous stream of water falling from the faucet, Peter’s bent back as he showers, and the flattened, non-perspectival arrangement of the tiled wall behind him. As we know, it is only by paying attention to these elements that we can secure the unique pleasure offered by Hockney’s paintings. Otherwise, why would we find it so hard to look away from them?
I think I can find that kind of intriguing, paradoxical tension in Oh’s work. I am curious about the colours he various, I find the density of white and black, which he persistently places in every painting, to be beautiful. At the same time, I pause before the way these colours demand that the depicted subjects be carried into a different kind of sensory experience. This pulls me further than the pleasure of simply recognising images in his paintings. For instance, his close-up depictions of anal sex scenes are both pornographic in nature and emblematic images frequently referenced within gay art. I find it especially intriguing when those images appear as dark red or murky gray silhouettes. What separates these scenes from ordinary erotic pleasure, I think, is their sensory quality. Their ability to give the image an abstract surplus. This makes me curious about how his works that present gay icons relate to those that depict subjects beyond or outside of them. I find his paintings of shells and flowers beautiful, and I am gradually drawn to their charm. I believe this draws me closer to his subjectivity, to the very gesture of subjectivation he is attempting.
It should be noted that the subjectivity or subjectivation I am talking about here is very different from the private, psychological self found in liberal worldviews. Subjectivation is not about creating an imagined entity called the self and giving it coherence. It is about challenging the existing order of the senses and showing that a new sensory world can exist. The works of Hockney or Bacon, whom we have loved passionately, lie entirely within this realm of subjectivation. They presented their desires as gay men, but what we see in their paintings is the new aesthetic subjectivity they created. If we pay attention to Oh’s work, it exists in the same way.
Thus, if we hope to enter a new sensory world through his work, we can fully encounter the pleasure offered by the work he presents now, or may present in the future. To reduce his work to merely another example of gay imagery, or to the act of telling a private story through imagery, would be too tiresome. We are already exhausted through the minihomepages, through the suffocating personal narratives of the “me” generation, and through similar repetitive gestures in contemporary art.
What is rare, then, is not another act of representation, but the sensory shock that allows us to experience the story in an entirely new way. This is precisely why he continues to address his gay desire through painting, and why this exhibition has been organised.