Nightcrawling

James Fuentes Gallery is pleased to announce Oscar yi Hou, _Nightcrawling_ in New York, the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery, opening this September. At the core of his practice, yi Hou takes figuration and the genre of portraiture as fields in which identity, relation, and milieu are continuously negotiated and reconfigured. Fugitive notions of subjectivity and personhood form the contours of this enquiry. In the new body of work comprising _Nightcrawling_, the artist turns toward underground nightlife and its afterglows as charged sites of being—at intervals both intimate and unknowable. Across yi Hou's paintings, figures and their environments compose a single, undulating locus. Limbs, hair, features, and silhouettes flicker through vaporous marks, drips, and hazes. Their surfaces register qualities of light sooner than they disclose identities. Sightlines and gestures circulate across the canvas like currents, folding the viewer into a humid image-world. In this setting, the "problem" of the Other—that perennial philosophical puzzle of how one subject encounters another—is embraced as a condition of feeling. The crowd becomes its own weather system; a blur of color joining distorted beat, light beam, and breath. "You feel, all at once, unitary, flickering, shared, and reciprocal," yi Hou described of this thick, collective terrain several years ago. Then, the artist used a dry-brush application of paint in loose blocks to establish a kind of irregular patchwork describing physiognomy and setting. Appearing in a more still, frontal capacity, the sitter in earlier works was bordered by distinct—if at times illegible—symbology and text that literally coded the buffer zone between artist and subject. Yi Hou's new works perform a kind of breakthrough inversion. Equally overfull, dripping washes of paint form loose, atmospheric grounds for liveness felt in flux rather than posed in place. Small floating icons still occasionally appear, as if drifting forward from those prior margins, but the image's perimeter now dissolves. As the new paintings move closer in, yi Hou exchanges the composed distance of his earlier portraits for an embeddedness within the scene itself. In many works, a direct, desiring gaze links subject and beholder, while washes of warm and cool light saturate these charged moments of reprieve. Erotic tension saturates this ever-elastic now. Hours of communion stretch and spiral, structured by a sense of endurance through which the quality of time thickens, loops, and drags. _Nightcrawling_ thus registers collapse as well as ecstasy, freedom alongside fatigue. As yi Hou writes in the project's accompanying publication: "Pleasure may be temporary. It is also transformative."