By Ashley Marilynne Wong

Review of Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity and Joy by Simon Wu (New York: Harper, 2024)

**Book cover of Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity and Joy by Simon Wu**
Book cover shows surface of blue-grean water in soft-focus with sharp glints of white light.

In Burmese Chinese American artist, curator and art critic Simon Wu’s dreamhouse-like collection, Dancing on My Own, seven resonant essays tapestry the magical walls of a private karaoke suite of unity. Running between nineteen and thirty-five pages, these labyrinthine pieces of jade (de)construct the notion of being vaguely oneself through the multicoloured (trick)-mirrors of arts and art-makers that explore connection, displacement and the fine line that joins those opposing hands in a shadow-chorused tango. The cavernous, well-lit corridors of ‘A Model Childhood’, the first essay in the book, form the fluidly solid gate of the library that is Dancing on My Own – a library housing Wu’s multiple and multiplying self-like homes of the heart: the real, the imagined … and the borrowed. With each expansive piece, the reader is led closer towards and deeper into the Félix to the author’s subconscious Felix, and the Steven to his inner – as well as outer – Telfar.

‘A Model Childhood’ begins with a phone call from Wu’s mother, informing him that she has found a new house – one that seems to serve as her American dream(house):

‘You have to climb the rungs when you can,’ my mom continues over the phone.

I imagine the rungs she describes as a ladder submerged in a grain silo filled with water. As she monitors the water’s rise from her raft, our current house, she eyes the next rung: higher, drier, safer. This rung would have a house with high ceilings and two staircases, rooms for all of us even if we are old enough to live elsewhere now.

As the author reflects on the phone conversation, he implies that his own American dream(house) diverges from yet parallels his mother’s by expressing his conflicting views on the things that have accumulated in the garage of their current family home for twenty-six years. He shares how he has ‘avoided the garage because I felt at different times suffocated by, responsible for, and protective of everything in it’, even though he considers the objects within useless. This clashes with his parents’ perception of those objects as things lying in wait for future use. It is this kind of juxtaposition, of the nuanced ways he views himself in relation to others and vice versa in particular, that permeates every nook and cranny of his gallery-like essays – ‘A Model Childhood’ included. Not only was its title inspired by the Japanese American artist Ken Okiishi’s 2018 exhibition of the same title, its structure and content were an echoing variation on the artwork’s theme, or rather, of its essence. Indeed, from an essay that begins as an archive of different – psychological and physical – housing experiences, ‘A Model Childhood’ transforms, slowly but deftly, into a flowering catalogue of art in its utmost literal sense, for the high-note ending to the essay is a description of Wu’s parents coming to his own exhibition inspired by that artwork. Housing, in this particular context, is used to mean rooming or homegoing but on a much larger scale.

After comparing and contrasting his parents’ and his own views of the American dream(house) and how the art exhibition A Model Childhood has fuelled his imagination, Wu describes, in the same essay, the time he begged his parents to buy him The Sims in secondary school. Upon acquiring the game, he lives vicariously through one of his avatars by making the avatar a doctor who saves up every Sims cent ‘to renovate his poor house into an eventual McMansion’, thus turning The Sims into a game of empathy. In that sense, the game can be viewed as one of the many safe spaces – scattered throughout the collection – through which the author acquaints himself with his alternate or possible selves by inhabiting others’ lives, aspirations … and even shadows, as is the case in ‘For Everyone’.

In that second essay in Dancing on My Own, Wu introduces the reader to two creatives: the Liberian American fashion designer Telfar Clemens and the Cuban American artist Félix González-Torres. Not only do these creatives share a history of being outsiders in America, but they also have utilised the powerful tools that are their names to represent their artistic selves. By choosing Telfar (the name given by his grandfather) over Steven (that given by his mother), Telfar Clemens, Wu argues, has remade himself into the American artist ‘from the child of immigrants’. The endeavour to transcend his roots for artistic freedom was also undertaken by Félix González-Torres, who requested that the diacritics in his name be removed from English publications of his work. In the same essay – in which he recounts his experiences interning at the Whitney Museum – Wu has returned those diacritics, fully conscious of all the potential problems of the gesture; because of his desire to conjure the version of the artist he and his fellow interns have seen in themselves as children of immigrant parents. ‘We needed both Felix and Félix, Steven and Telfar, to exist in print,’ he asserts, calling the artists by their first names, something he does with every creator discussed throughout the book. In this manner, Wu makes himself part of an art collective where all his soul friends are, and where he is free to sample the endless possibilities of who he could be and might have been.

Another way in which the author embraces endless selfhood possibilities is by losing himself in search of his other selves amidst the throngs of the EDM festivals and rave parties described in ‘Party Politics’, the fourth essay in the collection. In the midst of metaphorically trying on new selves, he nevertheless has not negated the importance of the act of self-grounding. Wu anchors the core of his being by making Robyn and her song, ‘Dancing on My Own’, a home-like refrain that he keeps returning to in each essay and by referencing or alluding to the title of a different essay in the same collection in all his essays. In doing so, he has triumphantly joined the walls of those figurative houses to form a neighbourhood. Or perhaps even a cherished hometown in which the lack of internal and external borders and definitions, and the fluidity of identity are a source of celebration and pride, and where together, each person dances on their own – soundtracked by a silent orchestra conducted communally. And most crucially, where all the Telfars, Stevens, Felixes and Félixes of the world at large see themselves in each other, and each other in themselves.

Indeed, by leading the reader to reflect on multiplicity in more ways than one, Dancing on My Own marches to every clash of humanity’s discordant and paradoxically synchronous drum and heartbeat, whilst joyfully dancing to the rhythm of its own beatbox; uniting individuality and collectivity in an accepting and affirming embrace-like duet – one of boundless and unconditional solidarity. All this makes the collection an incredibly nuanced, perceptive and life-and-self-affirming read.

Ashley Marilynne Wong graduated with a degree in English with Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Spillwords and Dark Winter Literary Magazine. In 2021, she won the YOUth of Tomorrow writing competition with her poem ‘Six Ways to Expose Your Daughter to Domestic Abuse’. As an unapologetic bookaholic, Ashley tends to read for at least three hours daily.