Ambiguous Beauty, curated by Seth Nguyen

Ambiguous Beauty

Aesthetics alone won’t save us, but perhaps it can make enduring seem worthwhile.
—McKenzie Wark, in her editorial note for e-flux #117

Named after an artwork by Yasumasa Morimura, which is included in this thematic grouping, Ambiguous Beauty makes complicated, troubling, and queer our understanding of self, body, and other. If the immediate association that occurs at the mention of queer is a configuration of gender identity and/or sexuality, the artworks in this thematic grouping encourage the viewer to consider other possibilities of the word, of seeing queer, and of being queer. Our desires, uneasy and exciting, are queer; our relations to each other and to ourselves, opaque and radiant, are queer. The transhistorical and transcontinental grouping asks its viewers to hold that which one may find strange, excessive, dangerous, or off-putting (especially when we encounter them outside of the museum’s hallowed white-cubed halls) with an openness that honors the fullness of their existence.

This thematic grouping was curated by Seth Nguyen AB ‘22, 2020-21 Curatorial Undergraduate Research Associate at the Smart Museum of Art.