Experimental video artist, film and media scholar Nguyễn Tân Hoàng investigates Asian and Asian diasporic masculinities, unpacking anachronistic perceptions, as well as the strategies to carve means and supportive networks to surpass its hinderings. By applying elements from Hollywood, European arthouse, gay pornography, documentary, and Southeast Asian LGBTQIA+ cinema, Nguyễn exposes, in academic articles and works like Forever Bottom! (1999), PIRATED! (2000), K.I.P. (2002), I Remember Dancing (2019), and Sad Porn (2026), the visual and social cultures inherited from colonial and imperial phantasies, while showing the resilience of queer agency to fool and counter them. In his book A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (2014), Nguyễn offers a critical examination of male effeminacy and its racialization, challenging negative connotations associated with bottoming and proposing its pleasurable and ethically associative potential with a destabilizing capacity to undermine normativity. Exhibited in Global Fascisms, the video look_im_azn (2011), addresses how gay Asian men navigate rejection on dating and sex platforms. In spaces that supposedly offer channels to gain sexual freedom, discriminatory cultures manifest in reproducible chauvinistic phrases like ‘No fats, no femmes, no Asians’. Strategies, like headless torso pics concealing recognition, and the use of profile names that reinforce racial categories (maybe proudly) reappropriating and/or profiting from the libidinal capital associated with insults, articulate a repertoire of masked contestation and subversive participation. 

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION: look_im_azn (2011), 1-channel video, colour, 5' 35". Courtesy of the artist