Across sculpture, photography, installation, and design, the artists in this exhibition move against inherited structures of identity, masculinity, and cultural expectation. Through performative acts of discipline and submission, queer subjectivity emerges as transformative, continuously negotiated through space, memory, matter, and the body. Domestic interiors, bodily adornment, architectural motifs, and inherited symbols become charged sites where intimacy, vulnerability, desire, and power are contested and reimagined.
For Dylan Chan, the parquet floor functions as both literal surface and psychological architecture. Associated with comfort, familiarity, and domestic stability, it becomes in Chan’s practice a shifting terrain onto which displacement, longing, and fractured belonging are projected. The domestic fragment operates as a quiet but persistent register through which intimacy is framed, negotiated, and unsettled.
In the work of Oat Montien, inherited Americana is reclaimed and reconstructed through a deeply personal queer lens. Drawing from the remnants of his late father’s cowboy-themed bar, Montien transforms patriarchal emblems into symbols of identification and resistance. The cowboy—an archetype of hypermasculinity—becomes a site of queer appropriation, while Rodeo Queen, his penis-embroidered spanking horse, playfully subverts the machismo of rodeo culture through gestures of dominance, submission, and camp theatricality.
The practice of Gregor Jahner extends these conversations into the realm of design and bodily performance. His Pierced Stool destabilizes distinctions between function and ornament, seriousness and play. Referencing queer body adornment and fetish aesthetics, the object exists simultaneously as sculpture, provocation, and tactile companion, sustaining a tension between exposure and restraint.
In the photographic work of Shen Wei, symbolism and performance become vehicles for examining queer desire, vulnerability, and structures of authority within Chinese cultural histories. Borrowing its title from the Han Dynasty story of Emperor Ai cutting his sleeve rather than disturbing his sleeping male lover, Broken Sleeve transforms an ancient gesture of intimacy into a contemporary meditation on coded eroticism, sensuality, and submission. Images of ceremonial gateways and pavilions further position architecture as a structure of power and containment within which hidden desires lurk in the dark.
The practice of Thyme Neelaphanakul introduces a material language rooted in organic transformation and tactile sensitivity. Working intuitively with flowers, plants, leather, and other natural materials, Neelaphanakul approaches sculpture as a process of continuous folding, cutting, bending, and reconstruction. While informed by traditional Thai arrangement techniques, her works move beyond fixed systems, inhabiting a space between softness and structure, delicacy and control. As a queer artist, her practice reflects identity itself as fluid, evolving, and constantly reshaped through tension, care, and touch.
Together, these practices resist stable definitions and singular narratives. Through gestures of reconstruction, subversion, intimacy, and care, Against the Grain proposes queerness not simply as subject matter, but as a way of inhabiting and reimagining the world. Whether through domestic fragments, altered archetypes, symbolic performance, or mutable materials, the exhibition reveals how intimacy and desire persist within structures that attempt to contain them—opening space for new forms of embodiment, connection, and resistance.
