CURA.

The symbolist painting practice of Oscar yi Hou (b.1998) hybridises Western and Eastern iconography. Born and raised in Liverpool, England, to Cantonese immigrants, yi Hou’s work is influenced heavily by his diasporic upbringing. Through his artworks the artist plays with the estrangement of his ‘foreign’ origin— the mythical Orient — establishing a declaration of ‘otherness’. The vertical format of this series of works, reminiscent of hanging scrolls, alongside his technical use of black dry-brush, indexes his deep interest in East Asian iconography. At the same time, he is equally captivated by American symbols such as the sheriff-star, cowboy hats, and the urban graffiti of New York City. By harmoniously combining these two visual and cultural worlds, yi Hou conjures a seductive autobiographical visual dialogue between the East and the West.

‘Crane Seeking Comforts’ counts on a complex mythology of iconography and symbolism. Yi Hou’s given Chinese name refers to an idiom that involves a bird— as such, the birds that appear throughout his practise are personifications of the artist himself. In ‘IMUUR2, aka: Cowboy Crane’, he represents himself in the margins as red-crowned cranes, traditionally auspicious birds in the Far East. In other works such as ‘Twobird, aka: Copulation’ or ‘Taijitu, aka: Cruising’ , pigeons are metonymically used to address and embody a queer narrative. In other works, such as ‘Sphincter, aka: Two-Pines’ or ‘Moonmad, aka: Cranekiss’ poems written by the artist himself are transformed into highly symbolic, quasi-mythological compositions. For these poem-pictures, yi Hou remixes the classical Chinese calligraphic poem form with his use of English script, interspersed with his trademark symbols of sheriff stars and Buddhist beads.