Asian diasporic erotic artists getting us hot and bothered
These artists are challenging taboos and reimagining sexuality across photography, painting, illustration, and fashion
Alexandra Leese's "Year of the Dragon 2024" project reinterprets the traditional erotic calendar, showcasing a range of Asian female bodies with dreamlike intimacy.
Alexandra Leese
Words by Clara Wang
It’s almost summer, and mother nature is f*cking. Flower buds have unfurled in vulvic bloom, the earth is sticky with creatures of all sizes in frenzied mating activity, and as we bare our skin to the tantalizing sun, one can’t help but feel the primordial force driving human beings through our lush, tawdry, obscene, fetid, intimate lives. Sexuality is as complex as it is simple: what turns us on and what gets us off is often as defined by opposition—this is hot because society tells me it’s not supposed to be—as by direction.
By taking audiences through different visions of sexuality, erotic artists explore the nuanced ways society shapes how we view our bodies, and our personal reactions to them.
Here are some Asian diasporic artists titillating imaginations across different mediums.
Yushi Li
Born in Hunan, China, Yushi Li is a London-based photographer known for capturing nude male subjects in raw, intimate settings. For collections such as My Tinder Boys, Li contacted men from dating apps she felt personally attracted to, and asked them to pose nude in pre-booked Airbnb locations. The anonymity of casual sex pervades these spaces, which are domestic but do not belong to those inside. In her debut photography book Baroness, Li poses fully clothed with nude male subjects, inverting the male gaze and provoking thought about typical gender dynamics.
Alexandra Leese
Alexandra Leese is a classic Hong Kong third-culture kid; the half-Chinese, half-British photographer was born in Hong Kong and left for boarding school in London at 11. Her work often explores her intersectional childhood by examining Asian femininity and masculinity through a female lens. Her book Me + Mine, shot remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, captures 44 nude women in their homes, ironically free from societal objectification while the world is locked down. Her project Year of the Dragon 2024 reinterprets the traditional erotic calendar, showcasing a range of Asian female bodies with dreamlike intimacy.
Yowshien Kuo
Born in the United States and artistically trained between the States and Taiwan, painter Yowshien Kuo’s unique style blends American pop culture and Chinese calligraphy. The popular image of the cowboy as a white heteronormative male often erases the significant percentages of Brown, Black, and Indigenous range cattle-workers in the 19th Century. Kuo challenges such archetypal depictions in 2022’s Frontier Romance collection, a series of erotically charged, Botero-esque paintings of BIPOC cowboys. Most of the figures are splayed in various stages of bondage, their impish faces hinting at pleasurable surrender. In an interview with It’s Nice That Magazine, Kuo says the collection aims to “bring light to the emotional struggle that is often hidden behind our armour, in this case Western clothing which allows a character to blend into their surroundings to avoid standing out, avoiding the fear of harm.”
Julian Hsiung
Self-taught New York-based artist Julian Hsiung is best known for his meticulous oil paintings of conventionally beautiful young men bursting with sensuality. The Beijing native grew up in Taiwan, fell in love with fashion and art in the 1960s through Western books and magazines, and worked in the New York fashion industry from the 1970s until setting up a painting studio in 2007. Many of the portraits displayed in his Brooklyn studio bear the names of their subjects, these virile Adonises of various creeds and colors lolling in repose, every striation impeccably rendered, chiseled jaws clenched, full lips slightly parted in open invitation. Hsiung’s masterful use of a traditional style and medium to portray the vaunted male flesh sold in Hustler magazine dreams evokes tangible yearning rather than crude pay-for-play.
Toshio Saeki
Born in 1945 and active until his death in 2019, cult legend Toshio Saeki is a founding father of Japan’s erotic-grotesque (ero-guro nansensu) artistic movements that emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s. Saeki’s graphic illustrations combine violence, eroticism, and surrealism with a dark humor: Shinto spirits chasing an amputated nude woman in bondage; a female demon pegging a dude after ripping a chunk out of his head; a woman nailing her own hand into the head of a salaryman worshipping her thighs. Many of his illustrations refer to folklore and dream states, layering the ancient, obscene nature of human desire against modern societal norms. Though Saeki’s work uses contemporary references and stylish graphics, it harkens to the long tradition of shunga erotic woodblock prints intrinsic in Japanese visual history.
International audiences began taking notice in the last years of his life, and his work was shown in major exhibitions in Los Angeles, Paris, and New York. The Death Book, a vast archive of Saeki’s illustration work, was released by Baron Books in 2023.
Shawna Wu
New York designer Shawna Wu’s day job is working with top labels like Helmet Lang, Alexander Wang, and The Row. The Singapore-raised designer turned her longtime personal fascination with traditional textile techniques into Carvings, a capsule collection of provocative sculptural lingerie crafted with Chinese hand-knotting that debuted at New York Fashion Week 2025. The collection integrates modern technology, old techniques, and sexuality; barely clad models sport 3-D printed bangles with designs derived from ancient Chinese cosmological beliefs, and matchbox merch distributed at the show was inspired by the “betel nut beauties” (sexy girls who sell betel nut to truck drivers) in Taiwan. In an interview with Dazed magazine, Wu describes the aesthetic as “Traditional and radical…So, using Chinese knotting for something more provocative.”
Published on June 19, 2026
Words by Clara Wang
Clara Wang is a freelance writer based in Austin, TX but often found wandering abroad exploring culture through the lens of food and drink. Her work has been featured in publications such as Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, Eater Austin, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, the Austin American Statesman, and the Daily Dot. Her monthly column Stir Fried explores Asian diasporic cuisines around the world.