Skyler Chen Paints Scenes of Queer Becoming

‘Never underestimate the effeminate child’ is the opening line of Gerry Potter’s poem ‘The Effeminate’ (2000). In it, the writer grapples with the often-maligned power of traits perceived as feminine in children assigned male at birth – children who, globally, are conditioned into an oppressive form of masculinity that is often ill-suited to them. I’m reminded of Potter’s emphatic call to protect and empower these children as I walk through Skyler Chen’s ‘Danger, Mystery, Love’, an intensely affecting solo exhibition featuring 22 oil paintings and four watercolours spread across four rooms at Platform China in Beijing.

In the large, framed, oil-on-linen work Boy with a Pearl Earring (2025), a child with an oversized head and dainty, pointed feet skips through a domestic garden in a white, knee-high dress that flares out behind them. The figure’s face is expressionless, but the angle of their body mid-motion suggests a sense of abandon. Despite this, the broader composition – like much of Chen’s work – is suffused with an air of unease. A woman in a pea-green tracksuit looks on, standing beside a terracotta-coloured house. In the foreground, a boy bathes in a circular pool while another holds a magazine featuring Tom of Finland, an artist known for his hyperbolic, homoerotic depictions of masculine authority figures. Is Chen’s painting of a life cycle, or of a family group?

The works in this show sit awkwardly within a category I call ‘queer lifestyle painting’ or ‘queer intimism’ – depictions of often-domestic scenes that serve as allegorical maps of homosexual and non-normative living. These paintings range from tender, such as Anthony Cudahy’s images of serious figures who exist in ambiguous relation to one another, to impassioned, like the canvases of Doron Langberg, which harness the viscosity of paint to embody the visceral nature of carnal desire.

A common criticism of this genre is its valorization of bourgeois leisure aspirations. However, that critique doesn’t hold true for Chen. His paintings are certainly peppered with references to artfully pruned bonsai trees (Behavior Modifications, 2025) and Chinese delicacies (Flavors of Restraint, 2024), but he appears aware of the trappings of these aspirational signifiers. As suggested by the figures’ expressions and the paintings’ titles, Chen’s subjects don’t seem content with the lifestyle these accoutrements promise. Instead, I believe these meticulously curated objects – and the strangeness they evoke – activate something much deeper: Chen implies that sexuality and gender are not only tied to characteristics, behaviours or desires, but also to an energy that shapes a person’s place in the world. If, as Potter warns, the oppressive social mores of an intolerant or entrenched society dim a child’s light early on, it can leave lasting echoes in how they connect – with people, objects and themselves.

The careful selection of Western media material in Chen’s work – such as Butt magazine (Constraint, 2024) – alludes to the ways contemporary noise continues to shape our ideas about bodies, sexual practices and what is considered de rigueur well into adult life. At times, his images slip into an almost René Magritte-style surrealism, as in Past Lives, Present Life and Future (2025), where a figure appears slumped, his head resting against a tree trunk. It’s as though the adults are desensitized and the children overwhelmed.

Chen’s paintings feel deeply honest, drawing on personal experience in a way I find both moving and refreshing. I’m generally sceptical of equating an artist’s work with their biography, but I can’t help reading the younger figures as versions of Chen. These delicately constructed works sometimes present a cinematic view of a child becoming an adult, simply trying – despite the expectations of others – to express themselves.

Skyler Chen’s ‘Danger, Mystery, Love’ is on view at Platform China, Beijing until 16 June. The exhibition was included in the programme of Gallery Weekend Beijing 2025

^{Main image: Skyler Chen, ‘Danger, Mystery, Love’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Skyler Chen and Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing; photograph: Liu Ruixue}