I had just emerged from the subway and was having an unpleasant phone call as I walked toward P^●P^●O^●W to see the exhibition of Owen Fu’s work “Own Alone.” It was the Thursday after Ash Wednesday and I was telling myself I was not going to smoke. As I stood outside the gallery trying to smooth the wrinkles of my phone call, I became fixated on the painting P^●P^●O^●W had placed in the window. Untitled (so proud) is a depiction of a man, with a bald head and glasses, smoking. It is almost more of a large drawing; dark lines on dark linen canvas that is left mostly unpainted or maybe has the slightest wash. The figure, seated in a metal tube chair, is unclothed but encoiled in a black cord that starts outside the picture and ends in a lightbulb held aloft by a small ghost. The mark making is spare, efficient, and confident. Small dots are scattered throughout the picture: black ones are flies and a pupil of the smoker, two orange ones glow in the lightbulb, and a red one marks the burning ember of the cigarette. I was seduced by the image.

        As I moved through the show it took some time to realize where I was in the world the artist created with these paintings. Fu cites a 1983 queer coming-of-age novel, Crystal Boys, by Chinese writer Pai Hsien-yung as a source of inspiration but also calls on his own experience of queerness, his experience of immigration to the US from China, and a merging of Eastern and Western painting traditions to inform the pictures in this show. Knowing this added an interesting layer to the paintings; however, they are not dependent on this knowledge. Fu’s works are beautiful, mysterious, and so intriguing that they convey meaning even without exposition. He has skillfully painted a world of ghosts and men who slink through woods, steal away into saunas, and pierce darkness with points of light.

        Many of the paintings are washed in layers of dark translucent paint, which give the linen a beautiful inky quality, spotlighting the painter’s understanding of material and light. The Bird, the Shadow, and the Thorns was a standout among these. The painting’s middle of the night atmosphere is illuminated by a snowman-shaped spirit with glowing orange eyes. The spirit has twig-like arms; upon one of these a wispy black bird is perched and over which a delicately painted thread is draped. The spirit has a red glower of a mouth that almost seems to be sliding away. Lastly, the spirit wears a crown of thorns which ties the painting to the long legacy of depictions of Christ, but this painting does not feel confined to Christian allusions. This crown does not feel like a device for fleshly torture or psychological cruelty. These thorns are simply a fact or a memory from another existence. This crown is a scar that tells a story about a wound that has healed.

        The dark paintings also include a remarkable pair of small pieces hung one over the other. The two paintings are beautiful examples of both eroticism and abstraction. They require a moment to reveal their narrative elements: The upper painting shows a torso half covered by a shirt as that torso connects at the belly another body, in what Roland Barthes, in Pleasure of the Text, called jouissance. Dark washes of paint enhance the natural beauty of the linen, and delicate line work, used sparingly, conveys the narrative’s crucial moment. The lower painting portrays only the shirted torso. The top half of the painting is nearly black, depicting only the subtle shifts of shadow as the shirt is lifted to reveal the belly, fingers, a ring, a navel. I again refer to Roland Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text: “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?” These paintings are called Untitled (Peach) and Untitled (Mango) which, in itself, amuses me.

        A large triptych, All Things Grow, is found opposite these two small paintings. This large work is the most mysterious in the show, the most difficult to read. The environment of the scene is a dark forest green that merges into a deep sapphire blue as you scan from right to left. There is no visible horizon though there is a sense of ground and sky. The black silhouettes of trees and figures emerge from the dark and are sometimes backlit by large globular orbs of blue-gray, sallow yellow, and an ashy green. Here and there the generally smooth surface of the painting is built up with charcoal-like bits. In the center a bright red object glows, a couple of yellow tadpole shapes move about. There are glowing white dots of eyes. It is a pleasure to look at and requires some playfulness to interpret—this is a winning combination in a painting.

        The show also contained a few brightly painted pieces which, like the smoking painting in the window of the gallery, contain figures deftly rendered into a monochromatic field. One is the blue of a window lit by television light, one is crimson, one is a mossy green. The green one is the most mysterious and the least explicit. Untitled (Holy Matcha) portrays a figure, knees to the ground, bent at the waist, head bowed, arms splayed. It is unclear if this a moment of agony or ecstasy, of prayer or tumult, but the bending of the body is felt by the viewer. A vertical stripe runs almost the entire length of the painting. It could be structural, like a pipe, or it could be fluid itself, like water or paint being poured. There is a circle between the figures knees which could be a pool, but it could also be the shadow of the figure’s head. There is a single black dot of paint on the stripe which, as a formal device, pins everything into place. It is the simplest of gestures, but it does something powerful; it conveys intent, care and even whimsy.

        Owen Fu accomplishes a lot in this collection of paintings. Together, the images combine to create a loose narrative in which the unknowns are as powerful as the information the artist provides. The use of detail is economical in the way that it creates narrative tension, and the employment of physical material provides an ambiance that is on one hand joyfully witty but also elegant and restrained. The paintings are sexy and spooky but approachable and enjoyable. The show, overall, is a generous respite from the real world, while at the same time conveying some vulnerable truths about the artist’s human experience therein.

Paul Moreno is an artist, designer, and writer working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a founder and organizer of the New York Queer Zine Fair. His work can be found on Instagram @ bathedinaftherthought. He is the New York City editor of the New Art Examiner.