Intimate Elsewhere brings together the work of five emerging Southeast Asian artists, Lucas Tan, Mark Hernandez, Thom Nguyen, Theeratatt Tongbai, and ACHI, to consider queer intimacy as a paradoxical space of longing where desire, fantasy, memory, identity, and place inhabit a gap between presence and absence, closeness and distance.
In the Intimate Elsewhere, fantasies serve as a screen onto which erotic possibilities are stronger precisely because they are idealized and unrealized. Intimacy is produced by distance rather than despite of it. In Sun and Moon, Lucas Tan’s (b. 2000, Singapore) subjects pose provocatively, yet appear vulnerable, physically present to the camera yet longing and wanting in the elsewhere of the hookup apps.
And conversely, physical proximity can generate emotional distance, longing for someone, something, or somewhere else. In Filipino artist Mark Hernandez’ (b. 2001, Philippines) In The Quiet After, the two figures inhabit the same space, yet are disconnected, looking away from each other, both seemingly containing an elsewhere that cannot be fully possessed by the other.
The Intimate Elsewhere can also be a historical elsewhere. In Thom Nguyen’s practice (b. 1987, Vietnam), queer sexuality is brought into traditional Asian painting, using ink on calligraphy paper mounted onto silk scrolls. In the triptych Fountain of Youth, ritual cleansing becomes a very intimate act that undermines the very authority of the tradition it inhabits.
The Intimate Elsewhere is a private and nostalgic world which is not simply somewhere we want to go but a place where part of the self already resides. In Thai artist Theeratatt Tongbai’s (b. 2003, Thailand) work, longing is closely associated with loss and mourning. His Untitled moody landscape and haunting figure are vibrant worlds altered by absence.
Finally, Vietnamese artist ACHI (b. 1993, Vietnam) approaches the body as both landscape and threshold. Drawing upon the mythology of the heavenly peach garden, he places the body within a world of flora, celestial forms, memory, and transformation. The result is an elsewhere where desire, spirituality, vulnerability, and embodiment can coexist.
