Hairy Intersections: Sungjae Lee's Queer Exploration with the Fire Island Artist Residency
How One Artist Used Chest Hair as a Medium to Examine Desire, Identity, and Community
Sungjae Lee is an artist from Chicago whose work is deeply intertwined with his personal journey and identity. Lee’s recent time with the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) offered him a fresh space to explore the intertwining experiences of race, queerness, and community within the context of Fire Island’s rich, yet sometimes discursive, queer history. Lee confronted the complexities of navigating predominantly white spaces like Fire Island while celebrating its history and localities, which have both challenged and enriched his artistic practice in larger contexts: an important prompt for working artists today.
Through his multidisciplinary approach, Lee delves into themes of identity, memory, and the body, as seen in his ongoing project, Temporal Chest Hair, developed during his FIAR residency. This work, which involves the collection and artistic use of participants’ chest hair, examines desire and labor. With a commitment to reflecting on and contributing to the future of queer communities, particularly those of color, Lee’s art is informed by both his lived experiences and the broader context of queer history. In the following interview, Lee discusses his experiences on Fire Island, the evolution of his practice, and his vision for the future.
Reflecting on your journey, how has your background influenced your experiences on Fire Island? What aspects of this experience have been surprising, and what elements have aligned with your expectations?
Lee: I've never been to any queer getaways in my life, and all I knew about the island was through Andrew Ahn's film Fire Island, featuring ‘gaysians’ as lead characters. As a gay Korean man from Chicago, I expected the island would be pretty white, just like l saw in the movie, but the reality was way whiter than my expectation, especially the Pines. I sometimes felt nervous to walk on the dock at the Pines since it made me realize how foreign and, in the extreme case, invisible I was.
I feel lucky to stay in the Grove, where the demographics are relatively more diverse than the Pines. Along with my cohorts from different backgrounds, I've met a lot of kind and generous queer folx (e.g., elder gay couples or lesbian activists) who inspired not only my practice but the gay life I want to live in the future.
In what ways does your queer identity inform and shape the conceptual framework of your current artistic practice? Not taking for granted that queerness is non-monolithic and varies.
Lee: My practice is heavily self-referential—meaning that I source materials out of my own history, memory, and interior/lived experiences that I've had as a queer and present them with my queer body. I whisper stories about my queer journey with other gay men into my participants’ ears (“Men I Have Ever Met,” 2015–present) or share diverse emotions generated by the word “white” along with a gesture of covering my body with white clay (Whiteyellowhite, 2019). I understand the pitfalls of materializing my identity and private narratives, but I firmly believe personal stories with political power echo one another. And because of this reverberation, I believe we can build a wider community with the language of art.
Do you feel that the label "queer" for any practice has evolved or taken on new significance in recent years?
Lee: I've been noticing that lots of recent queer practices think of a future with wider and brighter perspectives, such as a queer future for nonbinary, trans, Indigenous, and non-white people. Thinking of Joshua Serafin's 3-channel video installation referencing Pilipino myths or Seba Calfuqueo's video performance dragging a blue fabric in mother nature. Dreaming of futurity for queers of color has been well informed by José Esteban Muñoz's legendary book Cruising Utopia—the collection of the past quotidian things bearing a better future. Responding to Munoz and like-minded contemporary queer artists, I've been recently envisioning the future for queer Asian communities in my practice, where they can commemorate their painful past and think more of happiness, joy, and hope.
Do you have a summer memory that comes to mind for this Summer 2024?
Definitely my month-long stay in Fire Island. There are so many things I miss, but I miss the beach, where I visit almost every day to read books or write journals. It was my temporary library. I also miss the sunset and its reflection on the water at the dock. There is something about the sunset that makes me feel emotional yet peaceful. As a city boy born and raised in big cities, I appreciate what nature gives to us, like relaxation, exploration, and inspiration. Now I'm obsessed with the sunset, so I sometimes go out to see it in Chicago.
How do you use various media and materials to convey and examine your most urgent concepts? Can you give us the details about your project with FIAR?
The project that I worked on at the residency was my ongoing project called Temporal Chest Hair, where I harvested my participant's chest hair and glued it onto my chest. It's a multidisciplinary project examining the complex relationship between desire, race, gender, and labor through the service exchange with different bodies. I put flyers on every bulletin board on the island and posted a call on Grindr to search for participants. I filmed with a guy who responded to my call on the app and made a hairy shirt as a remnant of the interaction. I also collected all different types of hair from my residency cohorts, made cyanotype prints, and gave them as a goodbye gift. Someone left a cyanotype kit at the residency building, and as an artist who's flexible with employing various mediums, I thought it was a sign for me to try something new.
What is a recent exhibition, artwork, or practice that you have encountered that resonated in Summer 2024?
Lee: Charli XCX's Brat (obviously!)
Do you have any reading recommendations?
Lee: The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-sense-of-brown
The day before I departed from the island, I wrote a paragraph from the book’s introduction on the sand. The writing took an hour, and it ended up 587.5 feet. It made sense for me to write Munoz’s writing on the seashore as I spent lots of time reading his book at the beach. Thinking about the sand’s color as brown, the influx of waves, the writing being constantly erased, and most importantly, the beach facing toward Latin America where Muñoz was born–honoring his roots. Here is the paragraph I wrote:
The brown commons is not about the production of the individual but instead about a movement, a flow, and an impulse to move beyond the singular and individualized subjectivities. It is about the swerve of matter, organic and otherwise, the moment of contact, the encounter, and all that it can generate. Brownness is about contact and is nothing like continuousness. Brownness is a being with, being alongside. The story I am telling about a sense of brown is not about the formation of atomized brown subjects. It is instead about the task, the endeavor, not of enacting a brown commons but rather about knowing a brownness that is our commonality. Furthermore, the brownness that we share is not knowable in advance. Brownness is not reducible to one object or a thing, so the commons of brownness is not identifiable as any particular thing we have in common… A brown commons as I am attempting to sketch here is an example of a collectivity with and through the incommensurable.
Is there anything else you would like to share? (A poem, something on your mind, etc.)
Always looking for people who are interested in donating their hair and making art together! If you have any questions related to the project, please don't hesitate to contact me at thony0806@gmail.com
If you want to see my other works, here is my website:
If you're interested in participating but living outside of Chicago, let's discuss how to make it happen!
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