Artist Kenson Truong was at work in a small nondescript gray building on a steep, hilly road in Roxbury that serves as a studio for Tufts’ School of the Museum of Fine Arts when I met him last week. He was tinkering with some black, glittery cubes at the time – cubes that appeared like props for the background of an episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” of which Truong is coincidentally a fan.
The black cubes, however, were part of Truong’s poetry art project. He covers the blocks with translucent lines of poetry. The artist creates his “found poetry” by borrowing heavily from other text sources — in this case mostly pop lyrics — to create his own verses. The poetry is only discoverable with a black light flashlight provided to viewers upon their arrival to his exhibit. Visitors aren’t given any information about where to find the poems within the installation; they have to search out the words for themselves. The intention behind this design philosophy is to evoke the feeling of a dark gay night club, like the ones explored in between the lines of Truong’s writings.
Truong’s poetry cubes will be included in his upcoming exhibition at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, intriguingly titled “Usurper,” which opens on Aug. 29 and will run until Sept. 29. The artist joined the Gallery in 2020 after being encouraged by a Tufts faculty member to apply for membership in the gallery. He put on his first show, “Bespoke,” in 2021. “Bespoke” lyrically examined an octopus’ journey through the use of camouflage to survive and the consequences of trying to blend in with a hostile environment.
Truong became increasingly fascinated with marine life during his interdisciplinary undergraduate studies at Alberta College of Art and Design. His passion for art began in high school after a spinal accident left him struggling to walk and prevented him from playing sports. The two disciplines merged as he began painting and drawing marine life, with a fascination for invertebrates such as octopus and jellyfish. This is where he began to become particularly fascinated by sea creatures’ use of camouflage for survival. The phenomena would later inspire him to draw comparisons between underwater and human uses of camouflage for survival in his art. “Usurper” explores similar themes but digs deeper into understanding why the sea creature will travel to the hostile place again and again, even with an understanding of the harmful side effects of that travel.
Hailing from the Midwestern Canadian city of Calgary and then coming to Boston for graduate school, Truong had for a long time tried to blend in with the dominant white culture around him as he entered the dating scene. This forced him to confront many conflicting realities of his identity, culture, being gay, and how others viewed him and how he viewed himself – all themes explored in his works.
“Men would tell me I was not attractive because I was Asian or on their dating profiles it would say ‘no Asians,’” he told me when we sat down for an interview in his studio office. He spoke of his experiences of being too often on the ends of an extreme scale — being either outright rejected or fetishized simply because of his race. Eventually, his troubles with trying to make himself fit into an unwelcoming crowd of people very different to himself took its toll.
“It was a really confusing time of my life. When I was younger I was really grappling between wanting to fit into this gay male space, wanting to love my own culture and ethnicity, but I found that to be really challenging. In fact, when I was in my early 20s, I got to the point of really trying to avoid anything Asian, like Asian food, Asian music, I just tried to avoid it all to fit into whiteness.”
Truong later realized that the problem was not with him, but with a fragmented and toxic gay scene he was trying to mingle into. That realization led him to leave Calgary for Boston but he discovered that the city is, in his words, “not so different.” He told me that there’s “definitely more of a gay community here in Boston but eight years ago when I moved here, I found a lot of the same sentiments towards people of color, at least gay men of color weren’t really appreciated, and there’s still a really small queer Asian community here. At least I haven’t been able to find one in Boston.”
In “Usruper,” Truong tries to explain why people are drawn to gay nightlife even when the gay scene has the potential to be so harsh. He explores their futile attempts at camouflage. The poems examine the whole story of a night out, from getting ready to the anxious feelings that can arise when feelings of judgment strike. What happens next? You’ll have to find out, blacklight in hand, uncovering his poetry in the dark.