Scotty So

25 June - 17 July 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 25 June 5-7pm

Himbo Limbo is an interrogation of masculinity as racialised discipline, tracing the psychic and bodily cost of performing an ideal built for someone else.

Drawing from his upbringing in Hong Kong, So reflects on being forced into ice hockey as a child to correct perceived softness, and later joining a gay hockey team as a teenager, an experience where mentorship, desire, and exploitation coexisted. Hockey becomes both paternal enforcement and queer initiation. The exhibition positions the himbo, hyper-muscular yet infantilised, as a trauma strategy rather than parody. For So, the pursuit of muscular masculinity reflects both internalised racial hierarchies within predominantly white gay cultures and the algorithmic reinforcement of an ideal man: hairy, hyper-masculine, and white-oriented. Becoming a himbo is framed as a form of self-dumbing and numbing, an escape from the hypervigilance associated with CPTSD. If one is reduced to body and surface, expectation disappears. The work links this desire for simplification to childhood survival strategies, where smallness equalled safety and discipline.

The exhibition moves between two seemingly irreconcilable worlds: the hyper-refined aesthetics of classical imperial Chinese scholarship and the base, transactional infrastructure of Western queer digital culture. Forced into proximity, they reveal the same underlying structure. The Scholar's Rock enters as a structuring metaphor: the prized object extracted from its origin, aestheticised, and consumed by a dominant gaze with no interest in the landscape it depletes. The classical criteria used to judge a rock's perfection are recast as the mechanics of racialised desire, the same extractive logic running on different hardware across a thousand years.

The loop is the show's organising condition. Drawing on Samuel Beckett's closing words in The Unnamable, "I can't go on. I'll go on," the exhibition asks what it means to keep going when continuation is indistinguishable from compulsion. ICANTGOONILLGOON: without punctuation, the sentence refuses resolution, cycling through every possible version of itself. The calligraphy undertaken to resist the urge becomes the urge. The rock pushed uphill is also the rock that falls. One must imagine Sisyphus gooning. One must imagine Sisyphus is a gooner.

This figure of the rock, the Scholar's Rock, the boulder, the crashing gear, the looping screen, recurs across the exhibition as its structural spine. Each work stages a different register of the same exhaustion: the racial hierarchies encoded into desire, the dopamine architecture of digital compulsion, the trauma that makes numbness feel like relief, and the thin, persistent line between erotic surrender and somatic care.

Himbo Limbo stages masculinity as a loop between enlargement and erasure, where the body becomes both armour and site of disappearance.

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Scotty So is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans diverse media to interrogate themes of authenticity and authority. His work recontextualises found objects, images, and established narratives to critique institutional power and colonial legacies through his lens of otherness of his Thai, Hong Kong, queer, neurodivergent background. By employing an aesthetic that is simultaneously camp and sincere, he navigates the tension between the fabricated and the authentic, challenging the perceived truths of these dominant power structures. Originally from Hong Kong, So has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Scotty So is represented by MARS Gallery in Australia. So is currently working at the Boyd Studio under the Creative Spaces Program of City of Melbourne.

Image credit: 

Auspicious Dragon Rock 祥龍石圖 
Digital Found Image, Collage, Acrylic Lacquer Screen Print on Acrylic Mirror
80 x 120 cm
2026