Scotty So

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

Himbo Limbo examines masculinity as a racialised and disciplinary construct shaped by trauma, sport, and digital culture. 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. Internet reels, dating apps, and pornography circulate this figure as aspirational norm, producing a disciplining loop of comparison and self-surveillance.

Becoming a himbo is framed as a form of self-dumbing and numbing, an escape from 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.

Materially, the exhibition incorporates ice hockey gear as sculptural relic and fetish object, alongside a video installation in which white cis male financial dominants perform scripted “gooning” monologues that redirect humiliation toward breathwork and self-worth affirmations. By rerouting domination into therapeutic cadence, the work questions whether erotic power structures can be subverted into 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