"I Don’t Think of Art As a Weapon, But As Seduction”: Will St. John’s Vein of Irreverence

“There are many ways to hold water, without being called a vase,” New Haven-based artist Antonius Bui labeled their recent exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery. After speaking to the artist ahead of the exhibition's final weeks, it became immediately apparent that they approach everything with the same poetic grace that labels their works. Exploring the politics of their existence through an intimate lens, their artwork sheds light on the AAPI experience, the queer experience, and generally, the experience of living within a world that creates its own narrow constructs of beauty — and learning to defy them with poise.

Interpreting beauty and poignancy in their own way, Bui creates portraits of a range of subjects — from close friends to admired figures, such as iconic pornstars. Infusing every one of their artistic pieces with the same fluidity that courses through their veins, Bui’s work is ever-transforming. “My work is as non-binary as myself,” they candidly share.

office sat down with the multi-medium artist to discuss the poetry, defying stereotypes, and more, below.

This is your second solo exhibition, which departs from your first with the addition of certain aesthetic decisions, such as a novel color palette. How did this exhibition build off of the last?

For this body of work, I was definitely interested in still portraying us in all of our monumentality, our divinity, our poise, and our courage. But I'm also interested in the disarticulation of the body lately — us shattered or broken, exploring the hunger for a new language in politics. And how that requires us to dance within the cracks to compose and figure out ways beyond the coherent politics that we have right now.

As far as subjects, you focus on multiple different ones for this exhibition. You hand-cut verso paper to portray human subjects as well as fragmented vessels. How do these subjects further convey the message behind this exhibition?

Most of the vessels portrayed in the show, and the ones that I work with at large, are Southeast Asian vessels from museum collections around the world. I save the image and I liberate them or repatriate them in my own way, by shattering them. The thing that started this entire body of vessel work was how difficult it was for me to find Vietnamese vessels in museum collections. I stumbled upon so many stories about discovering shipwrecks and how many Vietnamese ceramic pieces had just been lost to the ocean. At first, I was so devastated because I felt like I was being denied access to history. But now, I kind of love this idea that they've escaped capture. They have found a new life underwater. They will no longer be cataloged and mislabeled. In some ways, being lost is liberation.

But regardless of whether or not I'm working with vessels, the human figure, or a combination of both, I'm interested in breaking away from the history of Orientalism. I think something that's really shaped the show and the newer directions of my work, is that the biggest given is being misunderstood. And the impossibility of fully getting to know someone, like even my own partner. We've been together for over eight years, but as deeply as we love and know one another, I'll never fully understand his narrative or his perspective. And instead of taking misunderstanding as a handicap per se, I think what I'm starting to view it as is a possibility to reinvent ourselves in every single situation. Like even when someone mispronounces your name, it reminds you of all the ways that you can be named or the ability to rename yourself. I think that goes back to this need for reassemblage and my hunger for abstraction these days.

I think it's definitely true that misunderstanding can actually bring further clarity. You have an intuitive sense of beauty in that your portraits highlight even the most minute details of your subjects, such as tattoos or unique body markings. What does an uninhibited sense of beauty look like to you?

An uninhibited sense of beauty for me acknowledges that we are past, present, and future. That we carry our ancestors whenever entering a room and we are building for future generations on a daily basis. I've been thinking so much about that, even in relation to fashion. I think this relates to beauty — what I love about fashion or self-fashioning is that every single day, we wake up and we decide which mirror to look into. And that framework changes as we continue to develop. While some may consider fashion the epitome of capitalism or too consumeristic, I truly believe in its power and also the fact that it's one of the most gorgeous ways to track the archive of being and existing. Fashion, adornments, tattooing, piercings — they speak of our values, who we are, and the geographies that we belong to. So I think another part of beauty for me lately is just understanding how porous and vulnerable we are as humans. I've been taking my dog on a lot of walks into local nature preserves and wetlands and we always see frogs, birds, and all sorts of creatures. I actually see myself so much more in those creatures than in other humans. So maybe for me, slowness is beauty. Understanding that we each go through our own seasons is beauty. All of us are capable of reinvention and queerness on the daily.

There's beauty in the fact that you can present yourself to the world in whatever way you want, and it might be different tomorrow but that’s okay. Through carving out space for others, literally and metaphorically within your craft, is there a heightened clarity you have reached when it comes to your identity? Who was Antonius before this exhibition, and who are you now?

It's always such an honor and joy for me to portray people, especially when I get to work with friends and family members. As I might have mentioned, this is probably my fifth or sixth portrait of Nu, and in this show, I got to portray them with one of their lovers. When I sent them the image of the finished work they went, 'Whoa, that's how I see myself post-top surgery.' They're preparing for top surgery in September, and it was so amazing that I could play a small part in their own self-actualization. That's more than I could ever ask for. If anything, I am just overwhelmed with gratitude to be sharing this lifetime with people who each exude a light, which I wish to also omit in this lifetime. The way that they dazzle, radiate, dance, write, each of them are artists in their own right. And it reminds me that I have no limits to my own practice. Because each of us is a product of one another, I am capable of what they provide for the world.

It sounds like you take a little piece of all of your subjects with you after working on these works. A lot of your work is centered upon the idea of “unlearning” — unlearning the expectations imposed upon the way you express gender, intimacy, and sexuality. What limiting beliefs are you still currently trying to unlearn and mend?

I've been thinking a lot about my problems with the word 'healing.' Maybe this reconnects back to who I was before and after the show as well. I've always dealt with the limitations of art. And I wouldn't trade my life for the world — I love artists, the ecosystems, the visions that we provide for the world. In many ways, I think we are fortune tellers. We're able to predict what a utopia could taste, feel, or sound like. It's just unfortunate, and at times paralyzing, how capitalism continues to prioritize object-making, perpetuate the idea of singular genius, and choreograph a scarcity mindset and ecosystem. This all trickles down into the inaccessibility of art, denying us so many opportunities for collaborations with other fields/industries, which could lead to even more change and revolution. I think this all connects to the limitations of Western psychology and how it's still so grounded in individualism, instead of confronting systemic issues. The way we pathologize things is so Western. So I'm trying to let go of a lot of Western understandings. Even the Western idea of 'knowing someone.'

What makes someone a “muse”?

Maybe a muse, for me, is equivalent to a crush. Having crushes is really important to me. I think it's because, when I was younger and not out, I had to repress so many of my feelings. In many ways, I was denied love or being able to express that. And now I feel like I enter a room and I'm just like, 'Oh my gosh, that's my crush.' I have a crush everywhere I go. And my crushes are just people that I intuitively feel magnetized to and very drawn to their essence, their brilliance, their way of moving, or their fluidity. Within my bodies of work, the muses or the crushes, they vary so much, from living people to artists who have passed away such as Mark Aguhar or Anthony Veasna So. If anything, it always goes back to crushes being a compass. For instance, Mark Aguhar was the first trans, AAPI artist that I ever learned about. And to see a badass be so multidisciplinary and understand every medium as an opportunity to cast a spell was so admirable. I've thought to myself, 'I wish you were alive so I could thank you in person.' So, if anything, a muse is a love that the English language isn't sufficient to express and therefore I feel called to create a visual manifestation.

I think that just encapsulates why so many people who create art do what they do. You deconstruct stereotypical notions about Asian American masculinity by shattering vessels and then carefully reassembling them, taking great care to emphasize their imperfect cracks and bumps. What can be understood or derived from their deconstruction and reassembly?

I believe we receive work when we need it the most. So I always encourage people to ask why certain feelings arise when confronted with such movements, such bodies, and such visuals. How do you personally relate to it, uh, as someone who does or doesn't overlap in identity markers? Honor the artwork by moving slowly with it. Similarly to music, books, poems, and so on, sometimes they take months, years, or decades to produce and conceptualize. So I think the biggest lesson in receiving work is just to be with it. And to return to it if you feel called to it.

Water represents the fluidity that courses throughout many of your subjects and yourself. Tell me about how the element finds its way into this body of work.

This body of work is a reflection on the displacement and dysphoria caused by US Imperialism and Orientalism, among many other things. In Vietnamese, Nước is a homonym for water and country. As a child of Vietnamese refugees, so much of my life has been learning to build a home and build a sense of community in a place that we were never intended to be on or in. That requires fluidity or porosity, and not only that but being willing to embody every single state of water. I can be a calm as a pond, and other days I have to embody the veracity of a tsunami to stand up for myself and for my own rights. I think this body of work starts to expand my own relationship to water and the spectrum of emotions. I think after this exhibition, I'm a lot fiercer than I used to be. I'm really learning to hone in on anger, anger as a compass for where I want to dedicate my time, energy, and care.

If the sum of your parts was titled like a poem, what would it be called?

“Upon Skin, Upon Stone”