by Adela Lovric, studio photos by Zicky Le // June 8, 2026
To reach Oat Montien’s two-story studio, you first walk through the leafy, serene garden of his family’s restaurant in northern Bangkok. Then past an art venue on the ground floor of the family house—Thailand’s first gallery dedicated exclusively to LGBTQ+ artists, founded and run by Montien. At the time I arrived, the space had been temporarily taken over by his sister Ann, who was practicing for the sound-healing sessions she provides for queer people.
The family compound—an idylic setup with a spiritual atmosphere, located near Don Mueang Airport—attracts all kinds of visitors passing through the city. Yet one particular kind of tourist has long frequented Montien family businesses in the block. For decades, the artist’s mother has been running a nearby sex parlor. “I grew up in a brothel,” Montien tells me, matter-of-factly. In many ways, his evolving practice draws on that formative experience, circling the themes of sexuality, gender and desire.
Montien moves confidently between different worlds. He studied across three continents before returning to Bangkok, where he has devoted himself to art, activism, community-building and an ever-expanding list of other pursuits. When I ask about the local queer scene, he answers half-jokingly: “I am the queer scene.” Zicky Le—one of Montien’s collaborators and the photographer for this visit—is quick to agree. For many in the community, Montien has become a patron of sorts, creating opportunities for others through the platforms and visibility he has accumulated over the years.
That visibility extends beyond the contemporary art world. Last year, shortly before presenting his works at the Thailand Biennale Phuket, Montien appeared as a contestant on The Voice of Thailand. It’s one of several personas he claims to inhabit. But even these seemingly disparate worlds overlap: Hera Chan, one of the biennial’s curators, joined the audience of this reality TV show in a seat reserved for contestants’ family members. Such unlikely crossings seem to happen naturally around Montien: contemporary art mingles with mainstream pop culture, spirituality with nightlife, poetry with porn.
‘Pearl Boy’ (2025), for instance, draws parallels between Phuket’s pearl cultivation and nightlife in Patong, tracing continuities of exploitation and extraction through the figure of an emancipated queer sex worker. The video is accompanied by a sculptural installation—oysters tied in shibari knots, placed beside an operating table, all washed in neon lights and soundtracked with a punchy track by local queer rapper $LUTTYP. Personal, collective and broader political histories meld into an unexpected, interconnected whole.
The work loops back to Montien’s upbringing through both subject matter and visual language. In the family-run brothel, Montien was in charge of the lighting design for the shows. This experience continues to inform the sensual, theatrical atmosphere of his works. “The idea of the naked body has always been with me, and the idea of creating narrative using lights,” he explains. “You can see that in the installation—the nightclub lights and how they lit a naked body to create a kind of narrative of fantasy.” Originally commissioned for the Thailand Biennale Phuket and shown at Pearl Theater in Phuket Old Town, the video installation was brought to Berlin for the Xposed Film Festival and is currently on view at Vierte Welt.
Unlike sensationalized depictions of Thailand’s sex industry, Montien understands it as inseparable from geopolitical history. American soldiers on rest and relaxation leave during the Vietnam War fuelled the expansion of Thailand’s sex districts, while Cold War alliances imported American ideals of masculinity, capitalism and desire into Thai society. If sex work forms one axis of Montien’s practice, masculinity forms another. In his studio, deer antlers jut out, as a reminder that toxic masculinity is a lose-lose game. Cowboy clothes are tamed by intricate shibari knots. “I tie objects like I tie bodies,” Montien says, describing the Japanese bondage practice that has become central to his work. “This represents the body of my dad.”
Montien’s father fashioned himself as a cowboy, embracing the aesthetics of American frontier mythology so devotedly that he opened a cowboy saloon in Bangkok. He died in 2023, leaving behind a collection of his paraphernalia—jeans, shirts, boots, leather accoutrements—which have since migrated into Montien’s work as props, both on and off screen. Worn by the artist during performances or suspended in his shibari sculptures, they become ghosts that allow him to process grief and unresolved tensions. The studio becomes a site of reconciliation between father and son; of a relationship where masculinity and vulnerability weren’t given permission to coexist. “It’s almost like I get to hug him again,” Montien says. “And I get to think about this masculinity that is almost like a burden to me.”
The artist credits his residencies at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles as transformative in that regard. It was there that he began reconsidering masculinity not only as oppressive, but also as potentially “centered, grounded and divine.” The connection with the foundation is clearly reflected in his work and has deepened over time. In 2024, it also brought him to Berlin, where he presented his performance ‘Ladyboy Bouquet’ at the Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival at Berghain. At the time of our meeting, that bond was still very much alive: the following day, Montien flew back to LA to perform at the foundation’s Artists-in-Residence retrospective.
The studio itself reflects an artist in flux, moving between different planes without settling into any one thing. Upstairs, tender pastel drawings of male models from earlier periods coexist with newer, “tougher” experiments. However, the focus on queer identities, bodies, desires and histories is a consistent throughline across different media. “Everything I do starts with a poem,” Montien tells me as he guides me through his works and research materials. “With a porn?” I mishear, which would have been an interesting lapse if it wasn’t entirely appropriate. Both, in fact, feed his practice. “Porn comes after,” he continues to explain. “But first and foremost, I’m a writer.” ‘The Exquisite Fall’ (2024), a film he shot in the desert, began with writing a letter to his late father. The project extends into a zine, examining the cowboy as a fantasy of masculinity circulating through Thai culture. Styled as a 1990s gay magazine, it is also a nostalgic reference to a time when Montien first saw the figure of a cowboy as a sex object.
Sexual desire is only one manifestation of a much larger inquiry running through his practice: Who gets to be seen? Who gets to be beautiful? Who gets to become a symbol? “People keep thinking of porn as throwaway material, something ephemeral,” he says. “But I feel it’s also part of our history, how we shape our desire.” This fascination has made him a thorough researcher and collector. In his studio sits an archive of hundreds of vintage gay magazines and photographs from the 1980s and 1990s, donated by an avid collector whom he prefers to keep anonymous due to his role in the military. For Montien, these magazines are historical documents as much as erotic ones. He studies how bodies change across decades, how ideals of masculinity shift, how gym culture reshapes gay aesthetics and how desire becomes standardized.
On the heels of my earlier mix-up, I was most intrigued to learn that all of these magazines feature poetry. “Porn and poetry are always together,” Montien says, which almost sounds like a manifesto for his own practice. “The pictures are very exposed, very beautiful, but the poetry is really sad.” His work often inhabits this same dual terrain—erotic but mournful, sensual but haunted—nowhere more apparent than in the body of work that emerged after the loss of his father. “Gay Asian Cowboy was birthed from grief,” he says, referring to a character he developed as an alter ego in the realm of BDSM. “Every time I go back to the desert, the desert teaches me something about grief.” The figure reappears in various iterations, operating on multiple levels at once: as a poetic tribute to his father; a softcore queering of one of masculinity’s most enduring archetypes; a response to racialized tropes regarding Asian bodies; and, at times, a revenge fantasy. “You like cowboy movies?” Montien imagines telling his father affectionately-antagonistically. “I’ll make a cowboy movie. But I’ll make it gay porn, because it’s what I love.”
I was curious what the body and sexuality represent to him on a deeper level. “When I tell people I do porn, sometimes they think it’s shallow because it deals with the body,” he says. “But actually, for me, it’s very spiritual.” The statement may sound counterintuitive to some, but as a self-professed “historian geek,” Montien has the receipts to back it up. He tells me about precolonial Southeast Asian traditions in which queer people occupied spiritual roles within their communities, about indigenous gender systems (Thailand recognizes at least eleven gender identities), and how these histories were erased under colonial modernity. “I’m trying to also bring that back,” he says. “And the cowboy figure is part of that too. The shaman quality in that is very important to me.” The sense that nothing is ever quite what it seems, and little should be taken at face value, seems paramount in understanding his work. Beneath the intricately styled, neon-lit surface grows a larger project of spiritual and cultural recovery.
Montien’s background in education in museums and galleries has shaped his artistic practice from the outset towards queering the Western art historical canon. In his paintings and drawings, the reclining nude is reimagined for the queer gaze, shifting the terms of who is worthy of being seen as a muse and who gets to immortalize one through art. He resists defining queerness through oppression alone, instead dwelling on the complex nuances and textures of queer existence. Adding the theme of sex work into the equation is when his works like ‘Patpong Narcissus’ (2023) came about.
This short film—recently on view at Thailand Biennale Phuket as part of Un.thai.tled’s group exhibition ‘In Nobody’s Service,’ and screened at Berlin’s Sinema Transtopia alongside James Bidgood’s cult 1971 film ‘Pink Narcissus’—reimagines Bidgood’s dreamlike visual language in a Thai context, centering the fantasies of a gay sex worker in Patpong. By placing a figure often reduced to an object of desire as the central protagonist, ‘Patpong Narcissus’ shifts attention to subjectivity that is missing on screen. “We often forget that queer people are marginalized,” Montien says. “If one day I don’t need to make queer art anymore because we’re actually equal, that’s great. But we’re actually not equal.”
I leave our meeting struck by his transparency and generosity, which seem to dictate both his artistic vision and his way of being in the world. “I need to not just get me through, but also uplift my community with me,” he tells me as we wrap up our chat. I think back to his story about a psychic predicting great things ahead in his career, hoping that they come to pass for this one-man institution who insists on extending his fortunes and learnings into a shared, expansive sense of possibility.
