All above photographs by Joel Tsui.

The Deep Sea is a Dark Room: Solo at Moss Galleries

Friday, August 15, 2025 - Saturday, October 11, 2025

The Deep Sea is a Dark Room imagines a future shaped by queer desire, transformation, and the need to adapt. For this exhibition, mosaic-covered sculptures and colored pencil drawings center hybrid figures, part human and part marine, depicted in scenes of intimacy and quiet connection.

The sculptures are tiled in ways that reveal imagery across their surfaces. Through shifts in color, pattern, and rhythm, figures emerge—embracing, floating together. These images are subtle, often only visible from certain angles or distances. 

 The drawings expand this world through mythic, sensual scenes. Figures blend with sea life, becoming something new. These images offer poetic glimpses of resilience, where love and lust persist amid the realities of climate catastrophe. 

 The title refers to both the deep sea and gay dark rooms, spaces shaped by anonymity, desire, and transformation. I’m interested in how those spaces overlap. Here, the ocean becomes a site for reimagining how we might evolve, not just physically but also emotionally and socially. In this speculative reality, pleasure and intimacy remain vital. Fantasy and world-building become tools for survival, offering a way to imagine a different kind of future.