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Playing off Wallace Stevens's poem "13 Ways of Looking," this column aligns with an author's book release by inviting the writer to elaborate on a selection of images that shaped their work.

The first thing I did when I began to think seriously about putting together a book was to call some artists that I had long admired but whose studios I’d never had the chance to visit. One of those artists was Stewart Uoo. Stewart is gentle and very tall, with kind eyes and elegant, long, gray hair—“handsome, if somewhat aloof,” as Andrew Durbin describes him in 

 (2017). I’d met him here and there at openings and parties, but this time I asked him to give me the full low-down on his work and he kindly agreed. We sat in his Bushwick studio as the sun went from bright yellow to brown honey on an early spring day, and he clicked through image after image of a decade’s worth of artwork, taking detours for gossip, production mishaps, and context. Afterward, we got a drink and then I went home.

I wasn’t entirely sure what he had shown me, but I felt a light buzzing in my chest. I was excited. It all felt 

the feeling of new knowledge on the horizon

the feeling of connection on a bodily, familial level.

Stewart’s work felt relevant to the book I wanted to write, to my life, to my future. But this was all just a feeling. Could I trust it? His work is hard to categorize—across sculpture, photography and drawings—but I began to graft a transformational metanarrative onto it: Stewart took his background as a gay, Korean-American child of immigrants and let it oxidize in the fashiony art world of New York. Lying on my bed, I scrolled through the files he sent me via Google Drive on my phone.

(2014). Initially, I was drawn to the image for the gay mundanity that it portrayed. Two men––lovers––laugh in a kitchen. One of them does the dishes while the other dries them. The man on the left wears white socks; the other is barefoot, and his toes almost lift off of the floormat, even the edge of the watercolor itself, as if his partner’s laughter could levitate him. There is intimacy, but there is also something unresolved: is there insecurity in the way their glances search for one another? “Something about that image contains so many conflicting and harmonious feelings to me,” Stewart said when I asked him about it again, years after our first studio meeting, “It really makes me laugh.”

 is a meticulous re-creation of a scene from a Japanese gay manga by Hiraku Taku that Stewart found on DeviantArt in 2010. He couldn’t remember exactly which one, but it was a digital image that he edited, changing the shirt, adding the crossbody bag. It reminded me of what one might do in grade school, tracing drawings and copying them out of fascination and love. Other works in the 

series are more sexually explicit, and Stewart’s hand is more visible: close-ups and watery scenes of 

(Japanese gay male romance for women), and fisting (self-explanatory). 

 captures not only the image of gay domesticity but also records Stewart’s admiration for another artist’s work. It is a reproduction that becomes its own rendition; something like a “cover” of another’s song.

The gesture of one artist grasping for another across time and space became an engine for the writing in my book 

. Taking in Stewart’s artwork was one of multiple instances that ushered this powerful feeling of artistic time-travel. At the time I could only identify it by intuition; in retrospect, I understand I had made myself open to something, and when you do that, sometimes the world whispers back to you.

Another artist on my list was Ken Okiishi—Japanese-American, long-time New Yorker, video artist. I sent him a gushing email requesting to meet up. Thankfully, he was flattered and said yes. We had coffee. He showed me his studio. The next time we met up, he took me on a memory walk to clubs he used to go to. He asked whether this or that person was still famous. I learned about 

(1997-2001), one of the earliest works he made when he was still a student at Cooper Union, Ken writes letters to famous artists like Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Jack Pierson about what techniques of theirs he could use to make his straight best friend fall in love with him. The works are simple: two pictures, usually one of Ken in the style of the artist, the other of a beautiful boy, interposed on one another, with a postcard letter below. The title 

 captures this wistful, yearning gaze, taking in another artist’s practice, as well as the gulf between them.

I posted this image to my Instagram on September 8, 2020; it shows my mom’s pink Victoria’s Secret bag next to my green Telfar bag. We were sitting in the waiting room of Blue Sky Dental in Chinatown for our annual teeth cleaning. She loves Victoria’s Secret. She waits for coupons, stalks the stores. And I was recently enamored by Telfar, a trendy unisex brand founded by the queer, Black designer Telfar Clemens and popular with Bushwick artsy types. My mom raised an eyebrow when I told her that I had spent over $100 on the bag, which is made out of vegan leather (i.e. 

). “For Everyone,” the second essay in my book, grapples with the differences in our taste. To me, I wanted the essay to enact a gesture similar to Stewart Uoo’s 

: a record of reaching across artistic generations.

“For Everyone” inspired me to look further into my own life. I wrote about the clutter and hoarding in my parents’ house that I tried to help clean up when I was living with them during the pandemic. My parents didn’t want to throw anything away, but I did. Why couldn’t they let go of all this stuff? What did I want by throwing it out? I learned that Ken had actually made an installation out of all the stuff in his own parents’ basement in 2018, and it made me think of this junk differently, as “fat to cushion the impact of immigration.” That’s the phrase I use in the first essay in the book, “A Model Childhood,” which is named after Ken’s work.

I imagined turning my parents’ possessions into an installation. And then, somehow, I did. In the spring of 2022, I asked my friend, the gallerist Helena Anrather, for a summer show, and “Victoriassecret” was born. In this exhibition, I brought together a bunch of things from my parents’ house—as well as works from Stewart, Ken, and other artists I admire—a physical embodiment of the literary approach of “A Model Childhood."

When I put words to it—this impulse to look across generational gulfs to understand art and history—I started seeing it everywhere. I probably can’t overstate the influence that 

had, and continues to have, on me. The piece documents Maggie’s mother’s life, the artist grieving her mother’s death, then eventually having to clean out everything in their New Jersey home. The best way I can describe seeing her film and installation at the Whitney is to note the 

I started looking further back into history, toward artists and collectives from a past that seemed to bubble just below the surface of where I was. I fell in love with an image of Bob Lee and Eleanor Yung, the founders of the Asian American Arts Centre in Chinatown, dancing at a post-opening after-party in 1982, because it made the past feel more joyfully present. Through my research, I became friends with Bob and Eleanor, and learning about the path they forged, as Asian American cultural workers, made my own work in museums feel like it had a lineage (“Without Roots But Flowers,” the fifth essay in the book). They danced, so I felt I could.

I probably put more of myself into my reading of these historical images than is permissible for a proper art historian, but that was okay, because the book was also the process by which I realized that I didn’t want to be an art historian—or not only that. I wanted to have idiosyncratic, irrational, and emotional reactions to art. I wanted affairs and trysts with art, not only journal articles and monographs. I often imagined what it would be like to live as these artists did. This candid photograph of the artist Tseng Kwong Chi became increasingly important to me.

Tseng Kwong Chi is known for his rigid, conceptual photographs for which he dressed up in a Mao suit to visualize the “Chinese national” he was implicitly perceived as by white Americans. But the truth was that he was decidedly of the diaspora, growing up in Hong Kong and Paris before studying art in New York. The Mao suit was a projection of what everyone saw of him––a China man––and I was upset thinking that art history had condemned him to a caricature of himself. Even if Kwong Chi had perhaps devised his legacy to be that way, I despaired. I imagined that his fate was my future. So I dug around in the archives for his image, without the Mao suit, where the artist is pictured as just Kwong Chi, and it became my sandbar in the waters of history, a place to rest knowing that his image would persist beyond stereotype.

From relevant, to revelation, to relative, my writing was guided by intuition and devotion. Before I began the book, I knew two things for sure: that it was going to be called 

, after the combination of ecstasy and melancholy Robyn captures so beautifully in her 2010 song, and that a painting by the artist Leon Xu, an artist I first learned of through Helena Anrather, who ran the gallery where Victoriassecret appeared, might appear on the cover. 

(2018) captures it all. It’s a shimmery, there-but-hard-to-describe feeling of elation, sadness, and possibility. In the last chapter in the book, “After, Life,” I talk about learning from my boyfriend Ekin that the Turkish word for the way moonlight sparkles on the surface of water is 

I did not know that word before I picked the cover, it just happened to work out that way, but it’s all there in that painting. It’s nostalgic but also hopeful, it’s happy and sad: 

. It's presumably of water but the longer you look at it the more it starts to dissolve; the sparkles start to look like galaxies. Like a city zoomed out very large, like a roll of film in the archive, a glossary of drawings in DeviantArt, or the cosmos, all in the palm of your hand. ♦

Simon Wu is a curator and writer based in New York. His debut essay collection, 

13 Ways of Looking: Simon Wu

One of the first artistic acts I remember is cutting things out. As a child, I would draw tiny people and cut them out with scissors, mostly for the purpose of tucking them inside the fold of a paper boat. Anyone familiar with my writing would probably be unsurprised by this love of collection, which showed up again in the fragmented, nonlinear essays I wrote in college and in the collages of cutouts from Google Earth I started making in grad school. I still remember the exhilaration I felt copy-pasting the first parking lot onto a blank Photoshop canvas for 

. Against the black backdrop, the excised shape was now free to enter into a conversation (about parking lots) with other parking lots.

In 2017, not long before I would start writing the talk that became my book 

, I went to an exhibit on Surrealism at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and saw a collage I would never forget. It was the five-foot-wide 

Midday Forfit: Feignting Spell II (Spring)

, made in 1972 by an artist who went by the mononym Jess. This piece felt like something I had been waiting to see, or had been trying to make, for years without success. It had to do with its sheer scale and coherence, marshaling what must have been thousands of pieces—from magazines, engravings, and puzzles—into one epic tapestry that moved me in an immediate way. I find it significant that even though I didn’t see the image again until years later (it’s almost nowhere online), the shape and effect of it remained in my mind: two figures in the color palette of a luxurious Turkish rug, swinging through a profusion of images that spill onto a wooden frame.

 and the pieces that represent the other “seasons” of this series are from the middle of Jess’s career, itself somewhat surreal. Born Burgess Collins in 1923, Jess grew up in a conservative family in Southern California, studied chemistry, and was drafted to work on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (where he also sent away for a copy of 

). In the years following the war, he took adult painting classes while working on plutonium production at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Washington state, now one of the most contaminated nuclear waste sites in the country. In 1949, Jess had a “nightmare premonition” that the world would destroy itself by 1975. He had also come to the conclusion that “the real truth—if there is such a thing—that you can learn from science is how little we know about reality,” and that “art seemed to address this more openly.” Jess redeployed himself to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute (the same place where I would later cut up parking lots), dropped his last name, and married the poet Robert Duncan, with whom he’d fallen in love at a poetry reading at UC Berkeley.

Jess eventually moved on from making his own paintings to collaging, assembling found objects, and reworking old paintings that he found in thrift stores. More than one person has used Jess’s training as a chemist to inform a reading of his work as alchemical. (One reviewer in 1993 referred to him as “the supreme alchemist of the junk shop.”) Likewise, even before I knew any of this background, Jess’s work moved me because it so vividly exemplified what I love about collage: it’s not something from nothing, but something from something. The ingredients don’t just hang together in a new way; they truly become something else. Rather than a style of image or gesture, there is a style of 

—you know a Jess collage (or “paste-up,” as he called them) when you see one. Duncan, who frequently collaborated with Jess, understood this alchemy better than anyone, writing: “Absolutely no part here is originally the artist’s. What he has achieved is totally his, but in every detail derivative.” This is perhaps most apparent in pieces that Jess made after he noticed that puzzle companies used the same cutout molds on different images, and subjected this knowledge to his own strange ends.

As someone equally drawn to the visual and the literary—and who experiences this as a conflict only when conventional boundaries are applied—I felt some deep sense of recognition when I found that the two books on Jess in the UC Berkeley library were in completely different sections: one in visual art, the other in poetry. In some of his earlier collages, recalling Dada, Jess used words alone; he also made his own books (a format he already saw as a “collage space”), which contain gleefully impure mixtures of images, quotes, and his own poetry. Many of his collages are covers for the books and journals of poet friends. 

’s fragments may be wordless, but they still pun and rhyme. They frustrate any extractive approach to reading, the idea that content can be detached and refined from its context. In the paste-ups, each piece, each participant, each “word,” takes its meaning from other pieces. It is all selection and placement.

Not that I think anyone who looks at Jess’s more complex paste-ups would believe they were easy to make, but as someone who works according to a similar logic, I know the unseen periphery of time required of each composition. Some of Jess’s paste-ups took years to make, and his unfinished project 

 took decades. This would have included not just cutting and pasting, but noticing, first of all. In one interview, Jess told the curator Michael Auping that he salvaged most of his imagery from books, magazines, and postcards wasting away in thrift stores, but that images could also be salvaged from “a possible obscurity” if they had “spoken up out of the matrix of images that surround them.” Auping reports that Jess treated his scraps like family heirlooms and would sometimes hold on to a clipping for more than 20 years. While 90 percent of his filed-away scraps never made it into a piece, Jess would “ritualistically continue the process of searching, finding, and filing.”

Searching, finding, and filing—especially in seclusion, as Jess often worked—are what sense-making looks like to me. I grew up in a time of grotesquely proliferating information, easier than ever to access and with a seemingly total lack of structuring narrative. For me, collection and arrangement were a response, a necessary adaptation: you could give up and live in a senseless world, or you could set about building sense from whatever scraps you could find. But this arrangement could be a pleasure in and of itself, full of devotion to each little piece and to the kind of complexity that needs only finding, not making. In a short text collaged into an announcement for Jess’s 1989 show at Dilexi Gallery, Duncan calls Jess’s art “not impression, not expression, but an involvement in 

.” It is this assumption that meaning is to be found among 

In the pandemic years, when I was writing 

, I sometimes returned to the humble art of making collages from whatever magazines were lying around, inevitably with 

in the back of my mind. I did this not as an art practice, but as a writing practice. Collage reminded me that even in nonfiction, there are so many more ways for things to be related than in a linear, causal manner. Likewise, those little collages were how I remembered that my book was not so much a traditional argument as an arrangement, what Jess might’ve called “a matrix for the imagination.” In 

, I mention the closing exhibition for my residency at Recology SF (the city dump), where I had made something like a collage: an archive of two hundred salvaged objects, monomaniacally researched and presented with tags you could scan in order to learn their life stories. “I don’t get it,” a woman had said to me. “Did you actually make something, or did you just put things on shelves?” The truth was that, with utmost care over months of late nights in the studio, I 

 just put these things on shelves. I’d compiled these histories, put them there, for her—to help her see them anew.