Notes on Owen Fu: Own Alone

Owen Fu: Own Alone

January 31 – March 8, 2025

A two-room exhibition of works by the Chinese, LA-based artist Owen Fu was the perfect way to end January. Each painting coaxes  you with its tenderness and impresses you with an unyielding melancholy. Sexual pleasure sparkles with a particular queer suffering—loneliness, obscurity, and impositions (perhaps not yet experiences) of shame. 

The first room presents a thesis of queerness’s relationship with obscurity and loneliness—an entirely-green painting which displays a figure kneeling, hunched, curling in upon themselves as if to shy away and isolate from their viewer or an entirely-red painting with a figure similarly hunched and retreating from their viewer, hand clasped around an ejaculating penis (alluding to an overwhelm of sensation or emotion that imposes a pursuit of privacy). Even in the moments of multiple subjects and their tenderness, the subjects are reduced to the inflection point of their relation: their monochromatized bodies pressed and pursuing the specificity of sexual or romantic pleasures. There is no sense of the figures’ relationship beyond that which the interacting body parts implies. On the opposite wall of these three paintings is a large-scale diptych focused on its shadowy, amorphous figures: All Things Grow, 2024.

After reading the press release, the figures’ quieted non-relation reminds me of Tom of Finland’s Silhouette - Under the bridge (1971) and Uman’s Midnight in the Park and Looking for Trade (2023). All three of these works allude, or directly display, the quieted systems of sexual (non-)relation that is historically, and contemporarily, how queer sex is conducted. All three of these artists, in varying degrees, are hyper-aware of the illicitness of existing as queer, and, as Owen Fu puts so poetically and aptly: “We are children of the night, wandering under the city’s glow, our fragile light borrowed from moonbeams and streetlamps, never our own.” 

Upon entering the second room, the works settle into a certainty of melancholy, nostalgia, and (visual) darkness. On an aesthetic register, they were gorgeous meditations on these particular themes: each work uses the darkness of the figures and the backgrounds to play on tropes of nightmares and uncanniness. However, comparatively, these works drift away from the thesis of the exhibition save one work that articulates a hauntedness of the domestic by crafting a simple home furnished with a couch and a dim lamp and materializing a veiled face that looms over the entirety of the constructed space. This room is also significantly less provocative and less referential to the queerness which flows dramatically through the first room. Nonetheless, the works are stunningly dejecting even if a bit disconnected from the more impactful works that make up the rest of this exhibition.

Owen Fu: Own Alone at P·P·O·W Gallery (329 Broadway) from January 31 – March 8, 2025.