Homeless · Selfless · Heartless
I began the Homeless series after encountering too many homeless people while working on The Other I. As a newcomer to the United States, I did not realize that homelessness is almost a constant presence in this city. At first, I imagined it was the pandemic that had driven countless Americans into bankruptcy, forcing them to sleep on the streets. This thought intensified my fear—afraid that I, too, might one day become one of them, even tragically convinced that perhaps I already was.
During those drifting days of selling paintings to survive, my eyes were inevitably drawn toward the homeless, and I projected countless romantic yet tragic narratives onto them. I named paintings The Minstrel, Quasimodo, The Bronze Age, and others. At the same time, I expanded “homelessness” into a metaphor: in truth, every human spirit carries some measure of homelessness. During the second half of 2020—when the pandemic turned New York into a half-empty city, filled with a strange, lonely atmosphere—Dumbo’s Undercurrent gallery accepted my idea, and the exhibition Homeless opened in December, running until heavy snow covered the streets outside.
Homeless, 2020
In 2025, while preparing a figurative group exhibition in my street-corner space centered on the body, I revisited these paintings. From a different perspective, I realized that more than half of them did not quite fit under the title Homeless. In images where tiny figures stood isolated, submerged within vast urban architecture during the empty-city days of the pandemic, the term Selfless seemed more fitting. Eastern philosophy has long taught us that much of our suffering arises from clinging too tightly to the self. Once we realize that we are not so significant, the mind withdraws—and that withdrawal dissolves both grief and joy, entering instead into a state of neither-sadness-nor-joy. Thus, Selfless became another complete spiritual thread.
Me'less, 2025-2025
Heartless emerged unexpectedly. While painting a portrait of a New York boy, I left the heart area blank. That absence made the painting suddenly come alive: a tall, golden-haired, handsome young man, whose features blurred, yet who bore no heart. At first glance, he looked optimistic; upon closer look, he radiated an inexplicable sadness. I realized that this was New York itself: people strolling serenely down the street, focused on shopping, only to break down and cry in the next instant. Heartless does not mean coldness—it is the paradoxical, fragile spirit of the city itself.
Heartless, 2020-2025
Homeless, Selfless, Heartless—through these three paths, I gradually transformed my fear and projections into deeper metaphors. Like a journey beginning on the street, ultimately descending into the body and the spirit.
Curatorial Note
Loy Luo’s Homeless–Selfless–Heartless forms a three-part structure that moves from social reality toward existential reflection.
Homeless is not documentary, but a transposition of pandemic-era New York into a universal metaphor of displacement and fragility: homelessness occurs not only in relation to shelter, but also in the subject’s relation to the world itself.
Selfless turns the gaze inward. Figures are diminished by vast architectural spaces, nearly silenced. Scale and negative space articulate the retreat of the self. This is not nihilism, but an Eastern-style withdrawal—where detachment generates both tension and clarity.
Heartless addresses the mechanics of emotion. The deliberate absence of the heart produces an image oscillating between robust appearance and hidden sorrow, evoking the affective economy and social performance under high pressure.
Together, these three series form a progression—social → subjective → emotional. Through a subtractive visual strategy, Luo distills street experience into a genealogy of existential questions, responding to the present moment while grounding her abstract practice in a new spiritual foundation.
