Exploring queer intimacy

After arriving in Thailand over a year ago, Olivier Chow opened a queer art gallery on the ground floor of his shophouse in Bangkok's Chinatown in June. Adult Material is dedicated to contemporary queer art in the region and beyond.

"I'm very aware that it is a different ecosystem. I'm starting to understand a little bit, but still exploring," he said. "It is like on-the-job training."

Coming from a Swiss-Chinese background, Chow wears many hats -- gallerist, collector and critic. In a previous life, he had years of experience in humanitarian work far and wide. He was the first LGBTI representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in its history, which spans more than 150 years.

In open, new terrain, however, the connoisseur sits between knowing and not knowing. It adds a layer of metatextuality to his gallery's second exhibition "Intimate Elsewhere". The exhibition, which runs until Nov 14, brings together five emerging artists from Southeast Asia -- Thom Nguyen and Achi (Vietnam), Mark Hernandez (Philippines), Lucas Tan (Singapore) and Theeratatt Tongbai (Thailand) -- to explore queer intimacy and its contradictions.

"It is not the intimacy that we usually understand when two people are close and happy, but it is the opposite of that," he said. "It is the paradox of intimacy, existing between presence and absence."

With 18 works dispersed across the room, no artwork stands as an entry point. Yet an installation by Nguyen is a real smack in the face. As a multidisciplinary Vietnamese-American artist, he turns traditional media, such as landscape paintings and calligraphy, on their heads with sexually explicit material. Hung from the mezzanine floor, God Of Dick is a 7.8m silk scroll of an endless penis. Nearby, a diptych, God Of Abs and God Of Dick connect like a jigsaw puzzle. Two triptychs, First Date and Fountain Of Youth, depict hookup culture and a cleaning ritual. While poking fun at body dysmorphia, his works offer a glimpse of intimate, yet casual relationships in the gay community.

Continuing the same tenor, Achi combines subculture with Chinese mythology. Constrict 1 and Constrict 2 depict the cropped frontal and back of a nude man tied with vines and flowers. Achi draws inspiration from the peach, which is loaded with sexual innuendo. Grown in the heavenly garden, the fruit ripens only once every few thousand years, granting immortal life to those who eat them. In Chinese folklore, spirits or deities are often associated with queer identities. Patterns on the nude figure evoke shibari and its paradoxical intimacy. Fantasy of sexual bondage vacillates between presence and absence.

An installation by Hernandez explores alienation, disconnection and loneliness. He is known for turning mundane existence into something deeper. Dry brushing makes his paintings dark, heavy and gloomy. For The Quiet After, two figures share an intimate space, but pull away from each other probably after sex. It captures the contradiction between physical closeness and emotional distance. In Eye On Distance and Where The Compass Turns, figures are more interested in something else than in one another. Subjects are perpetually chasing objects of desire elsewhere.

This resonance recurs in Tan's Moon and Sun. He amplifies parasocial relationships and the fantasies they produce between content creators and followers. His paintings depict the same anonymous figure, clad in a green bikini, who takes selfies without showing his face. While the content creator poses seductively to flirt or hook up, audiences, including gallery visitors, are titillated but quickly move on to other similar images. Erotic fantasy is produced, projected and consumed via the screen, linking content creators and fans who may never meet each other in real life, but have an intimate, yet fleeting encounter in digital space instead.

Fantasy culminates in Theeratatt's Untitled in a melancholy turn. Inspired by Linkin Park's One More Light, the first painting is a blue silhouette portrait of an ambiguous figure, who is indistinguishable, except for slit eyes. He told me that he drew this after reflection in the mirror. Inspired by a personal photo, the second painting is a blue silhouette of a roadside landscape. A sense of loss pervades his works. Rather than detaching, however, the depiction of an intimate elsewhere seems to allow for continued attachment to the lost object. It echoes Arnika Fuhrmann's Buddhist melancholia, where eroticisation of death makes possible queer desire that is not recognised by Buddhism.

In this exhibition, paradoxical intimacy can be thematically understood on many levels. It could describe an uncanny experience of knowing and not knowing. It could refer to personal or parasocial relationships and contradictions that occur. In psychoanalytic terms, a [queer] subject pursues an object of desire to plug the gap at the centre of being. Because desire implies lacking, it simply moves from one to another ad infinitum. No person can be fully present in this chain. Paradoxical intimacy, however, is broader than interaction between the id and the superego. Given erasure, marginalisation or conditional acceptance of queer communities, this conflicting emotion could be a product of encounter between heteronormativity and deviance.

Nguyen told me that explicit material is subject to censorship in his home country. If exploring the paradox of queer intimacy is the goal of this exhibition, it does succeed in exposing cracks. Intimacy is produced, sustained and amplified by distance.

"It's funny that they're okay with female nudes. When it comes to male nudes, even just the backside, they reject it," he said. "I think they're afraid they will like it."

"Intimate Elsewhere" is running at Adult Material until Nov 14. The gallery is 550m from MRT Hua Lamphong (Exit 1). It is open from 1pm to 6pm, Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 6pm on Saturday and by appointment. For more details, visit adultmaterialgallery.com.