Hey Handsome

OSCAR YI HOU (B. 1998)

Hey Handsome

signed, inscribed and dated 'Oscar yi Hou, 2021 MY HANDSOME EDDIE!' (on the reverse)

oils on primed canvas

26 x 20 inches (66 x 50.8 cm)

Painted in 2021.

PROVENANCE:

Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2021

EXHIBITED:

Online, Sprüth Magers, GO FIGURE!?, 19-26 May, 2021.

LITERATURE:

"Oscar Yi Hou," The Here & There Co., accessed 26 September 2025, https://thehereandthere.co/artist/oscar-yi-hou.

NOTES:

Born in 1998 in Liverpool, England, Oscar yi Hou now lives and works in New York City. A graduate of Columbia University, where he received a BA in Visual Arts in 2021, yi Hou has quickly established himself as a painter whose intimate and charged portraits navigate the intersections of identity, representation, and cultural symbology.

Yi Hou’s practice gained early recognition when his work was included in GO FIGURE!?, an exhibition presented in collaboration with Ed Tang and Jonathan Cheung at Sprüth Magers in May 2021. There, his work was shown in dialogue with pieces by such seminal figures as John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, and George Condo, among others. Each work chosen for the exhibition was intentionally interconnected, with the show’s press release remarking that “the sitter depicted in Oscar yi Hou’s painting may have stumbled home from Cao Fei’s disco.”

Central to yi Hou’s oeuvre is a deep engagement with portraiture as a site of layered meaning. “I work mainly in oil paint, working on either canvas or paper. Deploying language, symbology, and figuration, my work deals with the complexity of personhood rendered minor. Compositionally I pull from a variety of sources — images, archives, other paintings, life, and sketches” he tells The Here & There Co. Around the time of creating Hey Handsome, he also cited inspiration from graffiti aesthetics and Warrior, the television series. His portraits thus oscillate between the personal and the collective, the archival and the immediate, embedding symbols and signifiers that both reveal and withhold.

Hey Handsome exemplifies this tension through its striking visual language. The sitter, dressed in a vivid blue shirt articulated with sweeping, thick brushstrokes, conveys a sense of immediacy and tactility. From the shirt pocket protrudes a collection of colorful pens, a gesture at once quotidian and symbolic. Surrounding the figure, vivid lines and star motifs radiate across the surface, accompanied by cranes ascending into the upper right corner. Above, the painted word “HANDZUM” punctuates the composition. Yi Hou has spoken of his close connection to Chinese despite his inability to write or speak the language fluently, a disjunction he reconciles through the use of illegible text in his paintings. In Hey Handsome, the word “HANDZUM” becomes part of this visual vocabulary — a playful yet poignant inscription that transforms language into form, embodying the artist’s ongoing negotiation with heritage, identity, and self-expression.

Notable among Oscar yi Hou’s solo shows are The Beat of Life at James Fuentes, New York (2024), East of Sun, West of Moon at the Brooklyn Museum (2022–23), A Sky-Licker Relation, at James Fuentes, New York (2021), and Crane Seeking Comforts at T293 Gallery, Rome (2021). His work has appeared in major group exhibitions including RE: REPRESENTATION (2024, James Fuentes, New York), The Descendants (2023, K11 Musea / WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong), PRESENT ’23 (Columbus Museum of Art), The Range (Gallery 12.26, Dallas), and Go Figure!? (2021, Sprüth Magers).