The first time I ever heard Dancing on My Own from Robyn was a month or so after it was officially released in 2010. I was 18, visiting my grandmother in bleak Galway, Ireland. I remember looping the song blasting from YouTube on my shitty Android phone back then, over and over again until I got over it the very same day. I had no clue that years later, I’d stumble upon a book borrowing the same eponymous title as Robyn’s song. 

"If gays don’t make babies when we have sex what do we make?… Just the idea of ourselves, over and over?" Simon Wu ponders in his debut, Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity and Joy, published by Harper Collins in 2024.

A writer and artist, a millennial like myself, Wu, who is currently enrolled in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale, told me during our Zoom interview that he “prefers a colloquial way of expressing a really high theoretical thought.” This is the tone that he wanted to find in his essay collection. Wu, a Pennsylvania-native, has been cascading through a number of prominent placementships in New York, ranging from the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, and MoMA, only to realize that once he’d made it inside the steely art world system, it shifted his perspective: he needed to work his way outside of it. Perhaps to establish what “dancing on his and his community’s own terms” meant. Known for writing that appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Bookforum and LitHub among other venues, Wu was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2021. He is a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute and was a 2018 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Wu’s words are hyper-introspective and nifty. His non-fiction surveys and critiques shape-shifting scenes where what “being seen, being known and being loved” as an Asian American gay may or may not mean. Via formatting, then dissecting his Asian American-core aesthetics, Wu renders everything from cool-uncool NYC-afters, art world doom, friends and community, alt fashion, “slightly worn” CALLVIM KERNEL briefs “Made in Vietnam”, highs and lows of pop culture, his mother’s hoarding and family histories, wokeness, Berlin’ raves and hookups. The author harks back to the lineage of activism, the 1960s and ‘70s Asian American movement, Godzilla, diasporic communities and artists who helped to form his own vision. And he does so unavoidably, by diving into cultural havoc and its aftermath. In these shards, Wu finds conflicting states—the thin bar between inclusion and exclusion, embracing both overtly and vaguely Asian aesthetics, noticing a desire to explore the outside or staying with the cool. 

I continued reading Dancing on My Own during my summer trip, on the border between the Czech and Polish mountains. Three out of five days were so damp with nowhere to go that Wu’s book felt like my silent companion in a semi-vacant hotel reeking of fried schnitzels. While I saved my notes in the Kortex reading app, the outside turned into a blur with a curtain of fog so thick you couldn’t make out the grand tall pines. 

On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon on July 22, in between Richboro and Prague, Simon and I chatted about a backdrop of writing Dancing on My Own; auto-fictive elements in the book and a German ex-lover who came to Simon’s book launch in New York; a success of Telfar—a queer diasporic designer who dressed Beyoncé; and how trends like Kim Kardashian’s BBL and Ozempic hype monetizate and brand themselves by extracting from diasporic communities. Toward the end of our conversation, Simon told me about new songs he’s into and what his next book will be about. 

Days later, while transcribing our interview, I became increasingly aware of—and catered to—an idea of the hopes and visions it left me with. They were hovering around me like dust particles, and I tried to pin down as many as I could. What culture is a post-culture? Are we able to free ourselves, or at least “make space” out of the system implanted in us, in our very DNA? Or are we already so immune and indifferent that we aren’t able to distinguish its possibility? Chatting with Simon made me prone to believing that being on the outside, away from the crowds and hypes, while still belonging, could feel like a new vector. A new kind of possibility. Shall we (go on and) dance on our own? Aren’t we in some ways already? Perhaps. I had to ask Simon. 

 

 

 

When I was writing the book, I was trying to write what felt the most true emotionally during that time. Even if I imagined that with time and conditions changing, my sense of politics and relationship to commodities will change, and at times will become a lot more critical.

 

 

 

The first thing that comes to mind is that it was fascinating to follow how you weaved the personal and the theoretical in Dancing On My Own. You questioned your Asian Americanness as a gay person through a multiverse of references. How was it writing the book? What kind of processes did you go through? What did it give, and what did it take away from you?

Most of the writing/texts were collected from what I’ve been writing for magazines over the course of five or six years—from reviews and essays I’ve been doing primarily for art magazines. When it came time to put the book together, I didn’t know exactly what connected them all, but I knew I wanted to call it Dancing on My Own, and that I wanted it to be both about a certain feeling conveyed by the Robyn song but also a particular way of thinking about institutions. The process involved taking these pieces that I’d written over a couple of years, not with the intention of becoming a book, and trying to understand what sort of through line was going through them. A lot of that involved looking at the questions I’d asked in them and deepening the inquiry, but then finding the unexpected areas of connection. One of the earliest pieces was an essay for Drift Magazine called Party Politics. It involved questioning the implicit politics behind different sets of queer parties that I was going to. At the time, I had not immediately associated that with what I was writing about in terms of art exhibitions. Only through the process of rewriting those pieces did it allow me to make some more connections, but also tighten and narrow the scope to be about a certain set of questions around identity politics from 2017 to 2022. That’s a broad sense of what it was like to work on the project.

 That’s terrific to get an insight into your process of writing. I also read your piece Costco in Cancun (2024), published by The Paris Review. I loved this story. But thinking back about your debut, I imagine you have had editorial assistance from HarperCollins?

Oh, great, you read that. Definitely. Every piece began with an editor and went through a different editor at Harper. Yeah, there was a lot of help. I wrote Costco in Cancun after Dancing on My Own and it will probably be part of the second book project that I’m working on right now. I had to really write Dancing on My Own to get to Costco in Cancun. 

In the book’s first chapter, called A Model Childhood (named after the exhibition of Ken Okiishi), you investigate the relationship we have with ordinary commodities and how they define who and what we are and where we come from. I thought, to me, it’s like tchotchkes of various identities. It made me think, while reading about your mum’s “hoarding” (by the way, I think she must be a fantastic, inspiring person!) and the garage cleanup from which you selected objects to show in your Chinatown exhibition—what do you think in terms of identities now in 2025 amidst Trump's insane regulations, etc.? Which also hugely affect clubbing and partying. How does it affect your surroundings in NYC?

It’s nothing short of a complete overhaul of the era that I grew up in and the conditions for the identity that I first became an adult amidst. When I was writing the book, it was during a time when there was something like a left critique of identity politics. There were a lot of diversity measures happening, but there was criticism about those diversity measures, whereas now those diversity measures don’t even exist. So frankly, I’m still in the period of trying to understand exactly how to move forward. But I think what has been helpful is that, unfortunately, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened specifically in the United States. I’ve been trying to read as much history as I can around McCarthyism and the AIDS epidemic. People have been battling conditions like this for a very long time. Part of me is trying to recuperate and understand what the way to move forward for me is.

The book’s title—Dancing On My Own—borrows the title of Robyn’s song from 2010. The vibes of the song—an outsider dancing amidst the crowd, connected, disconnected, searching for a connection, the identity, seem to linger and cascade through the entire book. You write, “If you listen to the emotion within the song, you might be able to detect, or at least to graft, a feeling of community.” The feeling of this community, which you found while interning at the Whitney Museum, is palpable. In your own words: “We discussed SOPHIE song lyrics as seriously as we did museum retrospectives; we looked at Balenciaga runways as closely as Marx; queer theory as closely as Britney Spears’s Instagram posts. It felt like an ethical stance to decenter our cultural consumption from the hierarchy of fine art that we worked within. Our critique of capitalism was alloyed by a particular susceptibility to—and interest in—its seductions. Because sometimes understanding the desire strengthened, rather than abated, the want.” I loved this thought. Mixing supposedly “high” and “low” culture as a collective in order to dissect the capital’s “force majeure.” How do you think about it now? Is it still so present?

When I was writing the book, I was trying to write what felt the most true emotionally during that time. Even if I imagined that with time and conditions changing, my sense of politics and relationship to commodities will change, and at times will become a lot more critical. Sometimes that version of myself is totally into shopping and has nothing to do with protests, and other times it’s different. That’s how it felt, that two things were so inextricable––consumption and politics––at that moment, and in many ways they still feel extremely inextricable, perhaps even more so now. Part of writing the book was to at least capture that feeling and not necessarily to say that’s a good thing, or that that’s the way things should be, because they really shouldn’t. But that is a true condition. What does it feel like to be a young person today? What does politics within that look like? What does politics outside of that look like? Thank you for bringing that passage back. I haven’t thought of that passage in a little bit and it’s definitely how it felt and still feels sometimes.

Totally. You tapped into something truly palpable. Talking to my friends across Europe and in the United States, so many of them feel that—the need to deconstruct what’s inside this machine on their own terms, and some do and some, well, give up. Writing about such a precarious state can be transformative; one does become someone else.

Yes, I think so. Writing it—as writing often does—puts something into perspective. It helped me to process a certain set of years in my life, like the first Trump presidency, and now, already, things feel different, as I’m sure you know. 

In Dancing on My Own, you describe your experiences as a cultural worker from institutions like the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA. I used to work in the private art sector for five years. I left three years ago. It felt like that chapter of my life was over. I’m curious—as a writer and artist, how do you navigate being both part of and outside the art world?

I think that it remains a lifelong negotiation of being someone who really loves art and artists, and at different times likes and doesn’t like parts of the art world. Being beholden to the art world’s economies for your livelihood makes a different relationship to the art world than participating in it in general or socializing in it. In the book, it is this kind of moment where I feel like I wanted to take a step back from the museums. I’m in the PhD program now, which is an institution on its own, and I think, part of writing the book was to find a way to interact with both something like a PhD program and something like a museum or something as big as the art world on terms that are more comfortable to me, terms that feel correct. One thing that helped was spending time around artists and gallerists who’ve been in this space for a while, but took routes that were more unconventional. Maybe someone like Ken Okiishi, who went to Cooper Union, has been an artist for a very long time. He has been very much in the art world, but he also doesn’t consider it his entire world, and has many other worlds outside of it. Or someone like a curator, Olivia Shao. I don’t know if you know her, but she runs the space Loong Mah. I learned in the early 2000s she put together a show at David Zwirner; she was really in the art world. I guess a normal trajectory for someone like that is that they would go and work at the gallery or a museum, but she left completely and then came back to do something like Loong Mah, completely on her own terms. She runs the space and does whatever show she wants. What must have allowed that, probably, is that she found an economic independence that was outside of what the art world could give her. So that meant she either started finding a salary elsewhere and then she could do whatever she wanted in the art world. That was really intriguing and appealing to me—to be able to relate to the art world in a way where  I’m not climbing any ladder, I’m not completely beholden to what job I might get from this person, or what job I need to apply for, and rather try to find a way that can be self-motivated. It’s a continuing thing, but part of it has been finding ways to support myself—and writing has done that a lot for me, it has allowed me to be able to rely on writing rather than on the art stuff to participate in the art world. I’m not saying I’m never coming back to the museum, to the gallery. A lot of my friends work in the museums and galleries and it’s still around me.

Perhaps this “way back” can mean different things, different options yet unknown to us. Maybe this is the idea behind Dancing on My Own and what it proposes. How we can move through spaces, rethinking different conditions… 

Yes, part of it is that I don’t necessarily intend on being an academic, but I’m in the PhD program at the moment. What it allows me to do is to have six years of healthcare, so then I can write other things. There’s this public-facing thing of what your job is and then what it actually is for you. In Dancing on My Own, I quote Fred Moten, who once said, “You should take the staplers and run”: take the things and do what you want with them rather than what they want you to do with them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You give a glimpse of what Dancing on My Own feels like to you when you ruminate and write—“If the art world was an unrequited lover, or an ex, who it would be better if we moved on from, then “dancing on our own” meant making our own rooms rather than pursuing the hallowed halls of the institution.” How do you feel about this thought now?

It came from my friend Maia Chao, who is an artist, and she’s said something like the art world is like a toxic ex that you should really break up with. But you find other ways to relate to it. 

Apart from the music and art scene, you describe the rise of the NYC fashion brand Telfar, a queer diasporic designer. You write about Telfar's back then—unique “everyoneness,” akin to a modern Warhol—Telfar’s genderless reform in fashion. Looking at it now in 2025, it seems like many brands and creators adopted rather similar views and monetized it. Such “diverse,” “for all” aesthetics seem to become popular, mainstream fashion. How do you relate to this right now? What do you think about this right now?

I found Telfar’s biography very interesting, the way he works with clothes and community… I think he’s continued to have a great deal of success… I think he recently dressed Beyoncé for her tour and now has a brick-and-mortar in New York. That’s all really fantastic for him. If anything, I would hope that there’s more of the spirit of Telfar in fashion. There’s a nominal sense of unisex, genderless clothing, but not to the extent that Telfar puts through in his own clothing. Of course, Telfar is part of a larger moment around how to both capitalize but also create community around a concept of being a diasporic or queer person, and he’s one way of doing it, which is one way of commercial success. Part of the difficulty of writing about it is that the story is far from over. [Simon laughs] It's changing and developing every day and also aesthetics change quickly. A friend of mine was saying how, at that moment, from 2013 to 2020, it was also the time Kim Kardashian had gotten a BBL and Black aesthetics were really in, but then in 2024 Ozempic came out and skinny was back in some ways, and Black aesthetics are sort of gone again. It’s interesting to observe firsthand how those things change over a period of time: monetizing Blackness, then criticizing it, and then not being able to monetize Blackness at all. People can capitalize and build community, but I believe that those kinds of communities can persist past the moment of their immediate capitalization. Their capital can remain useful for the people who built it and not for someone else. It’d be crazy if Telfar sold his company to LVMH, though I don’t think that would ever happen. What was intriguing about Telfar at the moment I was learning about him was how fiercely he was committed to financial independence. He wanted it to be run on his own terms and with the community he selected in some ways. It looked to me as if someone was building a museum of their own… figuring out how to fund it themselves. It’s a fashion brand, but that sentiment felt very interesting. In a similar way, I tried to imagine what a corollary would look like in the art world.

I love the part in Vaguely Asian where you write about the mall, also about when you buy a vest from CFGNY (who coined the term “vaguely asian” in 2016), and in the end, you don’t really like the garment because it’s too ostentatious. It attracts a lot of attention. Then these hilarious briefs, Callvim Kernel, worn by the model called Franky. It had the auto-fictive reachout to me. Was it? 

Oh yes, a lot of stuff that happened during that time was more comical than I could have made up [Simon laughs]. I had to put it on paper. There are definitely elements of fiction. Reconstructing memory is very hard. For the purposes of an essay, events became abridged and condensed so they had more immediate meaning. Like the time I spent in Berlin with this guy, Simon. In some way/extent, he’s kind of a composite of one or two people that I’ve met there, although most of it was him. I really thought I’d never see him again [Simon laughs], and then he came to my book launch in New York. He literally lives in Germany, not even in Berlin. He lives in Munich. He told me he read the book and that he didn’t even know he was in it; that he didn’t think this and that happened the way I wrote it. So I told him, yes, he’s right, that I kind of “used” him as a composite of one or two people I met in order to pursue a certain theme of how I felt when I lived in Berlin. So there are definitely elements of fiction in the book where characters are combined or dialogue is heightened. For the most part, things are emotionally true. They were how I felt during those times.

Oh, this is a cool and hilarious insight. In some way, I was reminded of one of Guillaume Dustan’s novels. You know him?

Oh, not really, but I’ll look into it!

Talking about semi-auto-fiction, in the chapter entitled A Terrible Sense of When He Was Wanted and When He Was Not, you wonder: “I pulled myself away, saving my future self from the blunt sting of rejection. Instead, I hovered over to my Notes app, trying to make good on my newfound resolve to become a Person Who Journals. If gays don’t make babies when we have sex what do we make? I type, my fingers pausing as I scour my brain to come up with an answer, or at least another question: Just the idea of ourselves, over and over? I opened Instagram, and then I closed it. I open Grindr, and then close it.” Can you tell me more about this thought? I found this fascinating.

Ha, ha. Thanks for finding that passage. It’s been a little bit/while since I looked into the book, probably because my head has been in this other project. I can't believe I've put some of that stuff into the book. That is like a very colloquial way of expressing a really high theoretical thought of what I read in some theory texts about queer reproduction. That we’re not reproducing babies, what is the work that is being produced? I feel like this is from a seminar, but I prefer the conversations that happen several hours after the seminar at drinks…  like oh, I was in a class today and someone brought this idea up… that’s a little bit of the tone that I wanted to find in the book.

I think this approach or tone seems more accessible to a certain audience, or at least to someone like me. I don’t think I’d enjoy reading the academic version of that text. It made me really pause; it got me thinking.

Well, I think part of the book was very consciously not trying to write in a deeply theoretical way but trying to embed what I was learning into life. The same went for art, whereas most of the time you see whatever you’re seeing, and then it comes to you later. Like maybe a week later, you’re reading something by someone else, and then you’re like, oh yeah, I’m thinking about that painting or that person. In a lot of ways, it feels like a lot more representative of what it feels like to consume and be around art and theory because most of the time the point of the reading is not when you actually get it [Simon laughs], it’s usually, for me at least, definitely later. 

At the beginning of your conversation with Lilly Kwak, published at Interview magazine in 2024, there’s this photo of you in what looks like your own room, and someone like your dad closing the door. I found that photoshoot really cool.

Yeah, that’s my dad. The artist Jarod Lew took my portrait at the back of Dancing on My Own as well. He came to my parents' house and we took a couple of pictures with my family. We ended up putting some of these pictures into a show.

I love the idea that Interview Mag did a photoshoot at your real parents' place. Like for real. That’s authentic! Actually, I initially wanted to ask something else regarding your Interview conversation. You’ve said you listened to Chapelle Roan. What are you listening to in 2025? Did you find something close to Dancing on My Own?

A couple of things. There’s this new BlackPink song produced by Diplo. It’s just kinda interesting ‘cause you know, I didn’t really grow up with K-pop, but it’s becoming unavoidable. But BlackPink is very interesting. Although Diplo is an American producer, it doesn’t really sound like hip hop but like trance or 90’s techno.

I have to listen to it.

Yeah, it’s called Jump. We can say that’s what I’ve been listening to right now.

So we’re not listing anyone else? Not that blond chick, ah, what’s her name?

Sabrina Carpenter? Hmm, I like Sabrina Carpenter. I mean, another thing I’ve been listening to is Oklou. Have you heard of her?

Oh yeah. That’s much slower

Yes, her cover is super 90s looking. take me by the hand and blade bird, it just sounds like you’re a teenager on your parents' desktop and listening to music through some shitty headphones. It’s like a weird blend of nostalgia.

What are you reading right now? Is it more theory-based, or are you reading any fiction, too?

I just finished some fiction. I read Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna. You might find it interesting. He’s like a gay Irish writer. It’s a novel about a gay man and a straight lady best friend in London in 2019. It’s really fun. And  I just started Ways of Being by James Bridle. I read about it in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essay in Harper’s about the enchanted world, and at the end of it, he talks about this book. It’s called Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. It’s not academic even though it sounds really academic. He’s an artist and it’s about rehabilitating what our conception of intelligence or artificial intelligence is. So he’s looking at natural intelligences, what would an octopus computer look like, or what would a forest as a computer mean. I just started that and I’m really enjoying it because he’s also an artist, so his methods and research are very unconventional. The first chapter is him taking a drive in a self-driving car, trying to get the self-driving car to get lost

You’re currently in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale. Are you planning to publish another book? And if so, will it be non-fiction?

Yes, I’m working on something. Much the way the first book was a collection of things that I’ve been writing, the forthcoming book is about the American suburbs and how, at their inception in the 1950s, they were very segregated and primarily white, but since the 1980s until the last four years, demographically, they have completely shifted. They’ve become occupied by many immigrants. I grew up in the suburbs, and a lot of artists come from the suburbs, and move to the city. Costco in Cancun, and a couple of pieces from The Paris Review are in there. It’s looking at artists like Mike Kelley, or Tony Smith, who rode on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the group Emily’s Sassy Lime, which is a group of three Asian American women who formed a band in the 90s in the suburbs of California. Later on, many of them became contemporary artists, a sculptor, Amy Yao, who shows with 47 Canal and her sister Wendy Yao, who ran an art boutique and bookstore called Ooga Booga in Los Angeles. So it’s looking at my own relationship to the suburbs—it’s art and artists it produced.