New Currents: E8MKBOY
By Anna Lentchner
E8MKBOY, Mariage d’Amour, oil, acrylic, and pastel on canvas, 50 × 70 cm. Photo by Felix SC Wong. Courtesy Square Street Gallery.
Intimacy in painting typically features a cis man and woman, but in Mariage d’Amour (2024), Hong Kong-born E8MKBOY depicts a marriage to “itself,” the preferred pronoun of the artist’s persona. Bound by a shimmering lilac ribbon, the bodies are so intertwined that it is difficult to discern which figure the limbs belong to—a kind of physical fusion often reserved for portraying copulation (or, in this context, consummation). Delicate, feathery brushwork complements the soft satin and white lace details of E8’s wedding garb, including a veil and ankle-length stockings, while an abstract background in the colors of the trans flag elucidates the subtext of these feminine symbols. Piercing through this cloudy pastel composition, the central figure’s dark eyes fixate on the viewer. Despite E8’s depiction of self-intimacy, then, we voyeuristically become a part of its ornate bondage.
While this work imagines a soft, romantic intimacy, the composition is also emblematic of masochistic femininity. This signaling becomes more apparent in E8’s paintings of explicit desire, which often feature the artist’s own gender-fluid body in various states of submission and undress: The Kiss (2024) depicts three of its nude selves locking tongues and surrounded by pink phalluses, and Pressure (2023) portrays E8 nude again, on a couch surrounded by dominatrixes—a reference to the pornographic “Piper Perri Surrounded” meme, albeit with the genders reversed. These references to internet culture and sexual subversion (catboys, drag) are all the more emphasized by the paintings’ cartoonish, and often anime-inspired, style. Yet, the artist’s aesthetic is not exclusively immature. Like Mariage d’Amour, the 2024 painting Two Puppies (portraying two selves disrobed on a bed, positionally prepared for penetrative sex atop a fluffy pink blanket) demonstrates E8’s proficiency in depicting anatomical and textural realism.
Born in 1994, E8 describes itself as “a lover of love, the idyllic, and alternative modes of care and intimacy,” and is adamant that the reality of what it depicts “is not of importance.” Rather, subverting Hong Kong’s repressed cultural landscape, the artist seeks to redefine canonical images of romantic intercourse, one leatherbound catboy at a time.
Anna Lentchner is assistant editor at ArtAsiaPacific.
