Co-Presented with NAATA

Nguyen Tan Hoang kicks off Dialogues in the Dark: The Pleasures and Anxieties of Influence, a new series for which contemporary media provocateurs pair their own works with those of their avant-garde forebears. Vietnamese-American Hoang makes videos that raucously and provocatively subvert both pop culture and identity politics while simultaneously interrogating forms of desire in queer Asian male identities. Through playful and ironic re-appropriations of an eclectic array of images, he explores and explodes various forms desire, its mediatization and gay subjectivity. Tonight he presents four videos -his probings of homoerotic imagery in Forever Jimmy! and K.I.P., and the semi-autobiographically inspired The Calling (the priestly and the queer) and PIRATED! (boat child meets pirates)- as well as other works that have had an influence on his practice: Cecilia Dougherty’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Vault, Richard Fung’s Islands, Robert Blanchon’s Let’s Just Kiss + Say Goodbye and Clover Paek’s We Got Moves You Ain’t Even Heard Of (part one). (Irina Leimbacher)