Queering art and building worlds of knowledge
By Lim Sheau Yun

Hoo Fan Chon, ‘The World Is Your Restaurant (installation)’, 2021, banquet table with motorised lazy susan, cutlery, folded napkins, condiments, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and The Back Room.

In 2021, Malaysian artist Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982) presented ‘The World is Your Restaurant’ at The Back Room in Kuala Lumpur. On one side of the gallery sat a Chinese banquet dining table draped in a bright red polyester tablecloth, gaudy peel-and-stick wallpaper covering the walls and a glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling. On the other side of the gallery, two frames sat in juxtaposition: on the left sat ‘Family Album’, where Fan Chon’s family photos at Chinese banquets were framed in oval cut-outs, and on the right sat ‘Commercial Marine Fish (Pelagic) of Malaysia’, where Fan Chon had painted over a Department of Fisheries issued poster displaying a taxonomy of fish in peninsular Malaysia. He had turned each fish into a Chinese dish, painting serving dishes, sauces, and garnish on an otherwise scientific codification. “If my father saw this poster,” Fan Chon said, “he would only see food.”

Understanding Fan Chon’s work requires one to see the world as refracted through his roving, puckish gaze. Fan Chon spent the first five years of his life in Pulau Ketam (literally, “Crab Island”), an island off the coast of Klang populated in equal measure by Taoist temples and fishing families like Fan Chon’s. There was always fish on the dinner table. It was just a matter of what type: kembong, on a bad day of catch, pomfret, on a good one. Fish culture was coded with class, taste, and wealth, and presented an opportunity to upend its significations.

Hoo Fan Chon, ‘Commercial Marine Fish (Pelagic) of Malaysia’, 2021, acrylic on poster, 61 x 80cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Hoo Fan Chon, ‘Finnish Landscape Painting Series - #2 Everlasting Protection and Peacefulness’, 2022, oil or acrylic intervention on found painting, 38 x 31 x 5.5cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Fan Chon expanded this strategy of appropriation at his residency at the Helsinki International Artist Programme, having proposed a project to study the transnational salmon. At the recycling room in the residency, Fan Chon stumbled upon a landscape painting of “nothing”, just rocks and water. All the forgotten painting needed, he thought, was some cheek and Chinese-style embellishment. Since salmon and carp were known for their leaping abilities, carp could be salmon’s interpretive doppelganger. It could also suggest the aspirational class leap that so many Chinese middle-class families believe are at reach with hard work and perseverance, as encapsulated in the proverb “carp leaping over the dragon gate”. At thrift stores and recycling centres, Fan Chon sought out more landscape paintings, small enough to fit his suitcase, to paint over. The resulting thirteen works transformed bucolic Finnish landscapes – still water, wooden cottages, evergreen trees – into paintings charged with action. Each had a salmon leaping from the water, paired with an auspicious blessing for good fortune. They occupy a space of productive misreading, intentionally conflating otherwise staid categories: salmon and carp, Finnish and Chinese, East and West, appropriated and original, author and interpreter.

“It could also suggest the aspirational class leap that so many Chinese middle-class families believe are at reach with hard work and perseverance, as encapsulated in the proverb “carp leaping over the dragon gate”.”

At his best, Fan Chon’s work disarms. His goal, as he puts it, is to “mengataskan yang kampung, kampungkan yang atas,” which roughly means, ‘to make fancy the village, to make village the fancy.’ Atas (literally, “up” and also used to mean “fancy”) and kampung (literally, ‘village’) are as much state of minds as class categories: they are both adjectives and nouns, which can in turn be transmuted into verbs. If there is a medium agnosticism in his practice – he has worked in painting, installation, embroidery, video, wood carving, photography, and even curation – it is because Fan Chon’s work is subject driven first; form is secondary. “I want to hijack the intended technology to serve what I need for the work,” he said. The medium is important in so far as it messes with the message. In contemporary shorthand, he is queering it up.

Hoo Fan Chon, ‘Don’t cry my friend: 2012 London Olympics Part i’ (detail), 2023 –⁠, embroidery on badminton racquet, approx. 21 x 67 cm each. Image courtesy of the artist. — Hoo Fan Chon, ‘Don’t cry my friend: 2012 London Olympics Part i’ (detail), 2023 –⁠, embroidery on badminton racquet, approx. 21 x 67cm each. Image courtesy of the artist.

Labelling his work “queer,” however, has taken some time for Fan Chon to reconcile. While Fan Chon himself identifies as queer, his initial discomfort came from a rejection of Western genealogies of queerness. “My lived cultural experience is so queer,” he said, “Just look at [Taoist and Hindu] temples. Straight men do such campy things at temples.” Where American theorists like José Esteban Muñoz locate queerness in futurity, as a utopia yet to arrive, Fan Chon’s queering is firmly located in the now, turning to geographies and stories at hand to open new nodes of connection and relation. In a series titled ‘Don’t Cry My Friend’ (2023), Fan Chon reads the homoeroticism of sport into the long-time badminton rivalry and friendship between Lee Chong Wei and Lin Dan. Using photographs from 2004 to 2018 taken on and off court, Fan Chon produced eight embroideries stretched on badminton racquets. The threads are sketch-like, expressively articulating the musculature and countenance of each athlete. When they hug, sweaty after a hard-fought match, the tension is palpable. The works were produced for an LGBTQ show in Kuala Lumpur, and this was his attempt to include the heteros: queerness is an entry point for conversation, giving audiences a new beginning from which to speak.

“Fan Chon’s queering is firmly located in the now, turning to geographies and stories at hand to open new nodes of connection and relation.”

Hoo Fan Chon, ‘I Enjoy Being A Girl’ (still), 2022, single channel 1920 x 1080 Mpeg-4 video, 37.15min. Image courtesy of the artist.

Yet a serious attention to research underlies this playfulness. Art, for Fan Chon, is a mode of knowledge production. In 2013, at a thrift store in Penang, he chanced upon a series of photographs from the 1950s to 1960s of a woman performing her gender identity. The images were nothing less than remarkable. They first pictured a gender ambiguous figure – brows perfect, hair short but coiffed – dressed in boys’ clothes. Over time, the sitter became bolder, openly wearing dresses, putting on wigs and makeup, and photographing herself full-length. Fan Chon sat on the photographs for four years. In 2017, he learnt through a mutual friend that the pictured woman, Ava Leong, had passed away. But Anita, her childhood friend, partner-in-crime, and on-stage collaborator, was still alive. Fan Chon and Anita met once a week for several months, and sometimes Anita wanted to be interviewed. These recorded interviews became ‘I Enjoy Being A Girl’ (2022), a video about Ava and Anita’s friendship, their use of photography to explore gender, and a personal history into Anita’s queer life in Penang. There is a palpable sense that this project is archival: these images of trans showgirls, these stories of performing for former Chief Minister Lim Chong Eu, these technologies of transformation would have otherwise been lost. “My god, they’re all gone already,” Anita laments in the video, as she sees pictures of her and her queer friends. Anita, too, has since passed away.

Much of Fan Chon’s work stems on a dogged pursuit of maybes. The Finnish landscape series would never have happened if he didn’t find the initial landscape painting, and neither would have ‘I Enjoy Being A Girl’ if he hadn’t chanced upon photographs of Ava. Fan Chon’s work lies in the art of deep noticing, of drawing out worlds where others would just see images. His is an ethos of staying curious, staying critical. As for the rest, let the work take you where it wants you to go.