Scotty So
as shown in Himbo Limbo, George Paton Gallery (25 June – 17 July 2026)
This work reconstructs Emperor Huizong's Song Dynasty painting of the same name as a mosaic built entirely from found digital images of Asian gay adult film stars. At distance, the classical silhouette of the Scholar's Rock holds completely; up close, the surface dissolves into bodies. The formal inspiration is direct: bodies seen through the red LED light of Subway Sauna's mirror maze, reflected and fractured across every surface. The work maps the Huashigang (花石纲), the imperial network that plundered the southern Chinese landscape for the court's aesthetic pleasure, onto the ongoing digital circulation of queer Asian bodies within Western sexual economies. The classical criteria used to judge a Scholar's Rock: 瘦 (Leanness), 透 (Openness), 漏 (Perforations), 皱 (Wrinkling), are recast as the precise mechanics of racialised desire. Screen-printed on a mirror acrylic, the work absorbs the gallery into its own surface; to study the performers, the viewer must find themselves in the glass. The moment of recognition is also the moment of implication.