Photography by Vincent Tullo

“My life is enriched so much by queerness,” Oscar yi Hou tells Man About Town. “And that, in turn, enriches my practice – the whole web of queer sociality.” The Brooklyn-based, Liverpool-born artist is one of the most enthralling young queer creatives of his era. Picked out by James Fuentes before his studies at Columbia University had concluded, the portraitist had his debut solo show with the Manhattan gallerist by the time of his graduation. He’d win the Brooklyn Gallery’s UOVO Prize a year later in 2022, hold his inaugural exhibition at the institution in 2023, and make Forbes’ 30 Under 30 by 2024.

It’s been a steep ascent to heights of acclaim many of art’s most accomplished don’t see until their careers' latter chapters. However, with work rich in semiotics, in dialogue with the community around him as well as his life and identity’s many facets – from the iconography of queerness, rhythms of dance music, or Chinese calligraphy – its potential for resonance feels illimitable.

As part of Man About Town’s “Queer Creatives Shaping Culture” this Pride season, yi Hou talks his story from Liverpool to New York’s art scene, suffusing everything from hometown house parties to queer theory into his craft, and the Picasso mythological creation he’d pick as art’s unsung queer hero (or villain)…

Hi Oscar! You have the opportunity to curate the Pride float of your dreams — what five individuals (living or deceased) are definitely coming with you?
Yukio Mishima, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michel Foucault, Valerie Solanas, Boy George. I’d give everyone a katana and a line of c*ke and see what happens.
 
If you were introducing someone to your work in 2025, what would you say?
I’d say that my work has both broadened and narrowed in the past few years. A lot of the institutional and market discourse surrounding my work, especially a few years ago, hinged around a kind of legible-to-liberalism set of identities. I invested a lot of time trying to contest this legibility, this consumability. But part of that struggle, although well-intentioned, was done out of a fear of vulnerability. Being so young fed into this too. I kind of buttressed myself with theory.
 
Nowadays, I’m far more okay making work based on a constellation of feelings and intuitions. And a mutual trust between myself and my subjects. I remind myself that art, first and foremost, is a language of affect and aesthetics. Of pathos.

The move from Liverpool to New York at such a young age seems like such a monumental transition. How do you feel your experience of your queerness has shifted against your changing backdrops?
I figured out I was queer when I was around nine or so. Growing up online in the 2010s – thank god for Tumblr – I never believed that it was wrong or a defect in any way. I never felt any shame around who I was. I understood it to be a natural difference, but I also never felt the need to come out. I knew that eventually I’d leave for a big city and be able to exist more freely.

I love Liverpool. I’ll always be proud to be Scouse. But growing up there, I was contending with how stifling Liverpool’s hegemonic lad culture could be. Many of my friends were lads, but I never particularly wanted to assimilate into it, to play that losing game. So New York truly felt like liberation for me. Like it was waiting for me and I didn’t even know it.