These dreamy portraits rebel against stereotypes of Asian youth culture

There are many Orientalist and racist tropes in modern thinking which prescribe East Asian people as less ‘human’ than their Western counterparts. ‘Mechanistic dehumanisation,’ for example, purported in films such as Blade Runner 2049, suggests that Asian bodies and minds are closer to robots than humans: cold, overly rational, hyper-intelligent, and emotionally distant.

Many artists across the Asian continent and its diaspora challenge these tropes head-on, refusing the narrow roles they have been assigned. New York–based artist Gabriel Chiu is one of them. Through intimate photographic portraiture, Chiu resists fetishisation, model-minority mythology, and aesthetic containment, instead presenting Asian-American youth as emotionally complex, vulnerable, and unmistakably human.

His work centres solitude, softness, and interiority – images that ask viewers not to consume Asian bodies as spectacle or stereotype, but to sit with them as individuals. In doing so, Chiu creates space for Asian diasporic identity to exist outside expectation, where beauty is not eroticised, masculinity is not erased, and presence itself becomes an act of defiance.

Chiu’s first project Asian Kids was inspired by the iconic 1996 Larry Clark movie Kids, in which Chiu realised there were no Asian characters. “But I knew Asian people who hung around the people in Kids and were doing the same things, like skating. So I wondered why they were never depicted. That inspired my photography, which aims to break stereotypes,” he tells me, calling from London. 

The ‘kids’ in his project were dressed in private school uniforms, “supposed to symbolise the constraints that society gives Asian communities, how Asian communities are super conservative. It was a bunch of kids wearing private school uniforms, drinking and smoking, finding love, figuring out young adult problems, trying to find themselves.”

His latest project, Breathe Me In, is a mature evolution from Asian Kids, a quest to dig deeper than the surface of what representation means at its core, especially for children of immigrants. Chiu tells me he used to begin his photo projects by dressing people, “building an image through styling, construction, and surface.” But Breathe Me In does the opposite. “It’s essentially about undressing people, stripping back the styling and the performance to get closer to something more exposed and human.” 

As with many diaspora communities, Asian communities can be fractured: you’re either part of the whole or somewhat of an outcast. It can cause an identity crisis, a misunderstanding of the self, and a question of where you belong. Chiu and I, coming from different ethnic backgrounds but both children of immigrants, relate to this feeling. “An Asian person in Western society, they either only hang out with Asian people or don’t hang out with Asian people at all.” Chiu wants to speak “for the ones who don’t have many Asian people around them”. 

“That solitude and loneliness is part of the story – going through life, figuring things out, realising no one eats the same food as you, no one hears the same things at home.” For this reason, he chose to depict his models in solitude; not only do we meet them one on one, away from the crowd, which often changes the way we perform our identities, but we also understand them as whole, nuanced and multidimensional people – a stark contrast to popular or stereotypical media depictions of immigrant communities. 

As part of the diaspora, Chiu reflects his hybrid identity; the Asian models in Breathe Me In are the picture of grunge Americana: baggy jeans, tattoos, piercings, the men’s long hair. The same kind of sartorial choices are usually discouraged within traditional or conservative Asian households and communities. Chiu describes this as a very deliberate choice, but also a representation of his Asian models and friends that came naturally to him. “I think about the younger version of me, being lost, not seeing anyone like me on TV. The only people I had were Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. Even playing sports, people would call me Jackie Chan.”

Chiu instead looked up to Jerry Hsu, a Taiwanese-American skateboarder and photographer: “seeing an Asian guy skating and smoking” was almost transformative for Chiu, a turning point for representation during his formative years. “I just want more visual representation for younger [Asian] kids to feel confident,” he tells me now, inspired by the effects of seeing sportsmen and artists such as Hsu. “Our parents work so hard to get us here, but they force ideas on us. Art is frowned upon in Asian households. It doesn’t make sense to Asian parents.

“Going to Asian church, I saw kids not being themselves, just following narratives projected onto them. I could tell a lot of them didn’t love it. They just need to see it first to dream like that. Asian people need to see it first.”

The images are visually captivating; beautiful models, soft lighting, intimate domestic backdrops such as a messy bed, or standing in the kitchen dressed only in underwear. Chiu insists, though these images are beautiful to look at, he hopes to present these characters as “real people with real feelings that are relatable”, rather than “anything sexual. From there, you understand Asian people as human... In Western society, I find people don’t recognise Asian people as human sometimes. Asian people are very animated. I try to think about how I’d perceive myself if I wasn’t Asian. Any immigrant is stereotyped and we have to break these boxes. Even with art or music, we’re instantly judged because of who we are. And I’m trying to change those perceptions.”

Visit the gallery above for a closer look.