Oscar yi Hou lost a black Dsquared2 tank top at a festival, but for the foreseeable future he has at least one other version of it–he’s painted it into a self-portrait for his new solo exhibition Nightcrawling at James Fuentes Gallery, opening September 11. Inspired by and encompassing moments from the artist’s time traversing queer underground nightlife, the paintings in Nightcrawling have been two years in the making. It’s also a show yi Hou’s been wanting to work on for nearly a decade, crafting the techniques for painting what happens in the dark. 

When I visit him in his Dumbo studio, light streams in from mullioned windows onto white brick. In a short time, Yi Hou’s career has taken flight, with a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, a win of the 2022 UOVO Prize, exhibitions at galleries around the world, and more. It’s the day before the paintings head to the gallery, and they’re waiting on the walls. A portrait of yi Hou’s boyfriend nestled in bedsheets after a night out. A group staring up from a tangle of bedsheets that’s inspired, yi Hou tells me, by a 1977 Annie Leibovitz portrait of Fleetwood Mac from the cover of Rolling Stone. A friend taking a break from a party by a window. A very memorable afters. A couple, shirtless, bathed in the blue light of a dance floor. I almost hear beats pulsing out of them, feel the slick of sweat on my neck and back, the sludge of mascara under my eyes that says that I’ve lived.

Yi Hou’s images are built on intricate details, yes, but also trust, intimacy, and a love that’s essential for capturing a moment at all. Yi Hou’s work is built of these moments, the lives that make them and show up for them. Here, he talks with V about nightlife, witnessing oblivion, and crafting testaments to existence.

V: How did we get to Nightcrawling from your previous work? 

OSCAR YI HOU: The premise of the show is about underground nightlife, specifically queer underground nightlife. I’m from Liverpool, so we start going out pretty early–I started going out to clubs when I was 16 or so; it’s something I’ve always enjoyed. Then when I got to New York, especially after I graduated, it took on a real, new valence. I began to really feel enmeshed within the world of underground queer life. I found so much beauty and ecstasy, but also I would witness oblivion. A lot of it is about color and light and affect and feeling and sense, and like skin, like skin to skin, contact, sweat. It was really this balance of light and dark and shadow I was interested in. I actually wanted to make this body work for a very long time, probably like six or seven years. But I didn’t think I was capable technically of doing it until I started working on this show like two years ago. The timing was right, and I feel like I was ready to make the show. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past two years or so. But I’ve been thinking about it for a lot longer.

V: What technical capabilities did you feel you needed that you didn’t have?

OYH: Being able to paint darkness. Because I work chromatically, I work with colors rather than necessarily value, which is the amount of light or dark in a particular color or paint. If you work chromatically, what do you do when, let’s say, there’s like a blue fluorescent light on a face, or if you’re in shadow, then how do you paint that? Being backlit, light coming from different directions, like haze or fog. I didn’t think I was ready for it. And then I started trying it, and then I learned a lot of things technically through making the show. I think I was successful in it.

V: Beyond those technical capabilities, are there other aspects of your work as an artist you’ve seen grow or change here?

OYH: It was definitely–and I think actually this is a long arc throughout my admittedly quite short career so far–the use of symbols and symbology. If you compare those earlier works to how I’m painting now, which is a lot more pared back and there’s a lot less reliance on symbols and floating, non-diegetic symbols in the works. My work has more of a shift towards naturalism in the way that I’m painting the figures. There is still a lot of fabulation or imagination or expressiveness. I think I’ve become, and I feel this way every year, a better painter, and I’m pushing my craft after each painting. A lot of my work, to me, feels even more intimate and vulnerable now. 

V: What made you want to pursue that deeper intimacy you’re sharing in the work?

OYH: There’s more trust between me, the sitters and subjects. Also my social world has expanded and deepened over my 20s, and I think that’s reflected. Early on I would be kind of worried–if I’m representing someone else, am I going to do it right, or am I going to do justice to the setup? Then I realized, if you’re taking a photo of your best friend, they’re happy if you’re taking a photo of them. If you share it, they respect your craft and you as an artist, and want you to show this work, even if maybe your friend thinks the eye’s wonky in the photo [laughs], and like the hair is kind of off. They trust you, so it’s a similar process between me and the sitters when we’re so close. 

V: How do you cultivate that? 

OYH: There’s a lot of paintings in the show that come from actual moments of having lived life, and I think that’s why I was able to make the show–I’d lived enough life. One painting [is] based off a real moment I remember of dancing at the club at like seven a.m. or something, and similar with another one. One was based on my friend taking a moment to breathe in a club next to a window, and then one next to it was a very memorable afters that I can’t get into. And then that one is based off, you know, like peeing with my friend. One is with my boyfriend, and this is a real moment the morning after we went out. A lot of it is based on life and those real moments. I hope it comes across, and I think it does actually, that I’m in these moments, these spaces with these people. I’m dancing with them. I’m maybe at the afters for too long with them. Maybe we’re all on a bed. Maybe going in a pool with these people. So I think that’s part of why I think everyone is so comfortable with me displaying or representing these images, because I’m really embedded in them, and I’m a part of them, and I’m culpable. I’m heavily implicated in these works. You can see it in the gaze as well, the way the eyes are.

V: Why is it important to you that people know you’re part of the work? 

OYH: So it’s not an ethnographic project. I think there’s a lot of artists in all types of media when they are depicting or pulling from a subject or milieu, but they aren’t necessarily part of that milieu. Sometimes it can feel like a zoo experiment or anthropological project, which I don’t feel comfortable with personally in my own practice. So it’s important, and it wasn’t even forced. It’s just kind of a natural thing for my embeddedness to be really salient in these works. It’s a precondition to being able to make the paintings in the first place. 

V: I know you’ve said “I always try to live life before I image it.” What made you feel that you were ready to preserve these moments?

OYH: Even like high school, I would take so many pictures, and in high school the paintings I made were of my friends getting drunk or blackout, at house parties, like 16, 17 years old. It’s a continuation of that. Something I’ve always done as a lifelong practice is memorializing moments in a way that gives testament to having lived this life with people, is the way I think about it. Some of these moments are from years ago. But painting, the process of making a show takes a long time. A lot of these moments are from over two years ago. 

V: Do you feel like it’s a fight against loss? 

OYH: That is a really important line of interrogation I’ve always had, but I have a conflicted relationship to it. I remember back to when I was a teenager–it sounds so really silly to say now, but I was really fascinated with youth and like the eventual loss of youth. Even though I’m still a young person now. When you’re 17, you think being 27 is really old, so back then I had a more documentary approach to it. I have several like photo albums of these images, but I really don’t look at them or care about them now. I think the difference is that what I was doing 10 years ago, I was doing as an intentional way to preserve memory. I understand in the future it will be a record of these people in my life. I also have a Polaroid photographic practice, and that’s becoming an archive of life and all these people. If one thinks too much about the future, you really subtract yourself from the present, and then you miss out on living life in the present. I’m sure there’s people in my paintings who maybe I will fall out with, or maybe won’t like or will no longer be with us. But to think of that now is so devastating I would never think of it like that. Even though I have the understanding that in the future I’m sure this will be a record or archive, I think that is not my job. That is a historian’s job. Maybe in the future, if someone writes about me, they will do that for me. But that’s not my project or intent.

V: Are you a person who is good at living in the moment?

OYH: I try to be. I surround myself with very adventurous, boundary-pushing people, which helps because I’m naturally not really like that. I’m a very stable person. I surround myself with instability to generate excitement in my life, and it works. I think I can and do live in the present moment. I’m grateful to be alive. 

V: I’ve noticed that in larger cultural contexts, nightlife sometimes gets dismissed as frivolous. But for as long as it’s existed, it has been this driving cultural force. How do you think about nightlife in your own work? At any point is it not just inspiration, but a desire to work against a narrative like that?

OYH: I think people of all ilk project a lot of their anxieties and also hopes onto nightlife. Some people see it as this nihilistic thing, pure hedonism, ultimately a waste of time. Other people imbue it with a political potential and power. The way I see it is, it’s just more life, and this is what I’m thinking through in the text I’ve written for the show. It is just more life, and it’s a dense endeavor in terms of time, space, and sociality. If you’re spending 12 hours awake, it’s 12 hours more life. And if you are on drugs or any kind of substance, those are also amplified. Whole lives can come apart and come together. Whole relationships form and fall apart, and so it’s that density. My whole life and practice, I’ve been most interested in life, and my life is just more life, a continuation of life, operating under a very special set of circumstances. I don’t see it necessarily as discontinuous with regular life. Maybe it’s a privilege of being a self-employed artist, but it is just life at its most dense. I’m really interested in human relations and relationships I have with people, and those relationships become incredibly more dense. You spend a lot of time with people, moving about and dancing, and so it’s just really ripe. Even with this, this is just an exhibition, but my life itself is always going to be a part of my work because it’s just life itself.