Artists on His Enduring Influence 

I never had the pleasure of meeting Felix Gonzalez-Torres, but I wish I had. The first work I saw by him was likely the billboard series with the two pillows [“Untitled” (1991)]. At first, I thought, Gee, there’s a billboard advertising pillows, but there’s not much information. Still, I kept wondering, What is that? I remembered the two indentations in the pillows, traces of the two people who had been there. When I read more about it, I was extremely moved. I remembered looking at [“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991] a few years back and seeing people pick up the candy, start eating it, and walk away. It occurred to me that engaging with the piece was a lot like the way HIV was transmitted: you come upon an individual person, you engage with them, and then you walk away. You’re eating the candy. You are taking a part of that virus.

Gonzalez-Torres’s conceptual approach is almost the complete opposite of how I’ve approached my work as it refers to HIV/AIDS. He was able to use that trope of conceptual art and then imbue it with deep emotions specific to the AIDS crisis. That was a very subversive tactic, because the conceptual aspect of his work still speaks to people who otherwise might be uncomfortable with the topics of HIV/AIDS or homosexuality.

All these years later, I continue to engage with his work. I started my “Still Life” series in 1997, the year after I tested undetectable for the first time. That experience put me in a very different situation, one Felix Gonzalez-Torres never got to experience. I, on the other hand, found myself for the first time thinking I was actually going to live. I had a range of emotions. I felt very conflicted that I was going to live and many of my friends did not. I was questioning why that was, especially those friends who perhaps took the same medications I did.

I first saw the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the early 2000s, though I had seen it in books and magazines earlier. When I saw the candy work, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), I was very moved. To take the candy, put it in my mouth, and feel how it dissolved as I looked at his other works—that action impacted me a lot. I was thinking about which of my pieces have something in common with the work of Gonzalez-Torres, and I thought of En el aire (2003), which is composed of bubbles made with a mixture of soap and the water that was used to clean corpses—some of them murder victims—before their autopsies. Both involve exhibiting ephemeral objects in the museum, and hinge on interaction with the public. When the bubbles land on your body, you’re remembering a person who was murdered, but the gesture also reaffirms that that person lived. By feeling drops of bubbles, the public gets intimate with death.

That shock is what I experienced with the candy. Having that small sculpture in my mouth helped me remember his lover but also that the artist was alive when he made this piece. I see that union between the contact of the living and the dead in En el aire, reminding you that you are on this earth, but also of those who are no longer here. Gonzalez-Torres showed me how delicate and difficult memory can be.

Growing up in South Korea, I didn’t see a Felix Gonzalez-Torres work until my early 20s, when I went to Australia for part of my undergrad studies. Because of his sexuality and the content of his work, it wasn’t shown in Korea until 2012. I’ve made one work about Felix’s work, part of my piece Untitled (Chairs) [2023]: It shows drawings of empty chairs that various late artists would have sat on in their studios. All the artists either died of AIDS-related causes or made work focused on HIV/AIDS. Chairs immediately evoke something about the body, something to be activated by a body. Looking at a chair when it’s not occupied, we immediately think of the body and its absence.

In that work, I included a drawing of a photograph of Gonzalez-Torres’s video installation involving two chairs, “Untitled” (A Portrait) [1991/1995]. It’s about two bodies. It’s a pair. Of course, it’s about love; it’s about the missing partner, it’s about the dead. I think it’s about something more than yourself, about how you can actually extend yourself through another body or even a community of people. His life and work have influenced mine tremendously, especially the way he talked about absence and presence. In my work, I try to pay tribute to the artists lost to the AIDS epidemic. I want to talk about how these people are lost, but their legacies are always present with us.

I once got a present from my partner wrapped in a poster by Felix Gonzalez-Torres: an image of the sky, from one of the stack works [“Untitled” (1992/1993)]. I was probably in my mid-20s. I wasn’t making art at the time, but this work’s distribution—how it proliferated in the world, that this poster was and also wasn’t the work—fascinated me. It worked through how it circulated, and in that way somehow also freed the work to have this oblique quality too.

I started working with scores myself because of a very basic limitation: I wanted to find a way of working I could maintain, both economically and emotionally. I wanted to find a way the work could work without me, with the material conditions at hand. The score was a way of doing that: of letting go of control and instead, showing works in a way so that I didn’t have to be there to install them. The work constantly circles questions of labor and what work is deemed valid or not, as in Holdings (2024), a score for “An object that is no longer an artwork,” and Jobs (2024) a score for “A list of jobs held by the artist.” Those came very directly out of parts in my life that I had been compartmentalizing, hiding. That vulnerability is a risk, formally and personally, but also a tacit acknowledgment that artworks are always dependent on a great many other people to carry them. Gonzalez-Torres’s practice actioned that for me in many ways. As he said in a 1995 interview with Ross Bleckner, “Your limitations should be your strengths.”

The first time I encountered the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in person was when we were both included in the 2016 exhibition “Art AIDS America” at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. His “Untitled” (Water) [1995]—that curtain of blue, clear, and silver beads—was in the show. More recently, I saw one of the candy works at the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s a really generous work. I took a few candies and put them in a corner of my studio; it’s like I have a piece of this artist. That work resonated with me, because in my practice, I’ve been thinking about the preciousness of work and the ways in which the work can interact with other people, as well as the act of giving.

I’ve been making these untitled paper flyer works for a few years. After showing them, I’ve let people take the flyers. I love the idea of the flyer being the party favor, of how someone can have something.

I’ve also been thinking of his billboard work, showing the empty bed, the impression of what once was. As someone making work around HIV, that particular body of work subverts what we think about when we think about AIDS. In a visual context, it’s generally about what state people’s bodies are in. The absence of those two bodies is very poetic. And again, it’s very generous, to share something so intimate and personal. In a way, you’re seeing a feeling. I lost my father a few months ago. When I went inside his house, I made a conscious choice not to photograph anything, except for one picture of just a few things that were left in the home on the floor. I think of it as a portrait of my father.