Overview

At the foundation of the project is Exposure, a series of hand-painted black-and-white photographic portraits disrupted by burned circular interventions. Beginning with intimate portraits made in the studio, these works move through acts of hand-coloring and erasure. Faces are obscured, surfaces pierced, and vulnerability is both protected and intensified. The series investigates the tension between anonymity and exposure, asking how identity survives concealment and how queer male bodies are shaped by the gaze.

From this emerges Intimate Studies, a progression that deepens the inquiry into queer sexuality and coded visibility. In these black-and-white photographs, hand-tinted red and mounted on 30 x 30 cm wood panels, the model’s genitals are intentionally obscured or negated. The series draws on the culture of alternate accounts, secret nude exchanges, and the private circulation of desire within queer communities. It considers the complex relationship between secrecy and exposure, where concealment does not diminish eroticism but instead reframes it through tension, shame, intimacy, and agency. Beauty is revealed through vulnerability, and absence becomes as charged as disclosure.

The painted works expand these themes into material and spatial experimentation. The Small Scale project consists of 30 x 30 cm studies on wood that function as sites of play and investigation, where inks, paints, and mixed materials test the project’s visual language. Through the striking use of red, black, and gold, and the recurring singular red dot, these works distill the project into a concentrated form. They act as intimate material studies, holding vulnerability in suspension while exploring how symbolic form can carry emotional and bodily presence.

In Large Scale, this language opens outward onto canvas. The red circle, seemingly lost in Exposure, re-emerges as a symbol of the individual moving through experiences of choice, exile, birth, and death. These large-scale paintings explore the journey of self and the nature of social interaction, transforming intimacy into something environmental and immersive. Ranging from 75 cm to 180 cm and made with Japanese ink, oil paint, and aerosol paint, the works invite viewers to reflect on presence, identity, and the spaces we occupy. Here, vulnerability becomes not only personal but social, shaped through movement, encounter, and scale.Taken together, the project forms a sustained meditation on queer embodiment and the politics of visibility. Photography, painting, and material intervention are used not simply as mediums, but as ways of negotiating what is hidden, what is revealed, and what remains unresolved. Across each series, vulnerability is treated not as weakness, but as a condition of beauty, resistance, and connection.