What’s Happening: Tom of Finland changed the world’s erotic imagination. A new exhibition at David Kordansky in New York draws out how he achieved it.

The Download: “I don’t even remember there not being a Tom of Finland,” said the writer Brontez Purnell at a panel to launch “Tom of Finland: Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works,” on a rainy January night. David Kordansky Gallery’s recently opened Manhattan outpost was packed to hear him, along with the artist Nayland Blake, the Drawing Center’s chief curator Claire Gilman, and Tom of Finland Foundation co-founder Durk Dehner, all gracefully corralled by the gallery’s Julie Niemi.

The crowd laughed and nodded at Purnell’s impossible truth. Whether or not we were there to see it firsthand, of course, the world existed before Touko Laaksonen began thrusting his technically astonishing, unabashedly explicit illustrations of swole men with swollen members into the hands of anyone who would take it. But it’s true, because once he got around, their sui generis sexiness slipped into the very fabric of 20th-century America.

Tom of Finland took centuries of homoerotic art—from Greek warriors cruising each other across ancient wine vessels through Michelango’s muscle studies, George Platt Lynes’s graphic early-20th-century photographs of male bodies in shadows to Physique Pictorial’s porn-as-wellness-tutorials—as tools. Also in his box? The inflated glamour of advertising and cheap thrills of comics. Both show up in the preparatory collages of male models smoking and leather-clad bikers on their hogs. Across the gallery, illustrations show Tom’s process of isolating the parts of the body that signify masculinity and then queering them.

Big hard dicks are the tentpoles, sure. Tom worked his pencil hard enough to render their preposterous pneumaticity recognizable, but pitched them between the ridiculous and the sublime, like a billboard’s perspiring and monumental can of Coke. In today’s world of Pornhub and Sniffies, what invigorates is the tenderness, the way the first encounters in those drawings become, in his finished work, world-building exercises of men caring for each other. Perhaps that’s the biggest fantasy of all.

Two full illustration series prod an understanding of Tom as a progenitor of zines. Both were sold as comic books where laws allowed their distribution—and widely bootlegged elsewhere—between 1968 and 1986. Greasy Rider (1978) is a cowboy fantasia featuring a turtleneck almost as handsome as the trio of rough-and-ready studs hellbent on harnessing the potential of each other’s natural resources. In Highway Patrol (1982), a pair of cops stop feeling each other up just in time to cuff a civilian. Their officer orifices enforce the pleasure principle in every possible arrangement.

Both show off Tom’s undeniable skill as an inker and penciler. The politics are, perhaps, trickier. One could read Greasy as a socialist tract against private property—or a celebration of the thrill of trespassing, which in the end must demand an unequal power dynamic. Highway mostly stays in the lane of eroticizing authority. Here, all cops aren’t bastards, but they might be pigs. Still, as Blake noted during the panel, “When you look at these illustrations, everybody flips. Nobody stays on top forever.”

Except, so far, for Tom himself. There’s little body and gender diversity here, and it’s a little heartbreaking to see how easily his hyper-macho utopia can, in the wrong hands, cool into dystopian body fascism, and worse. And the censorship that kept his work so hard to find through much of the 20th century continues: Instagram and TikTok likely wouldn’t touch most of the work here, so the curious will have to return to the printed page—namely, the accompanying publication with text by Purnell—to see what the fuss is about.

Still, Tom’s legacy erects itself in the grids of Grindr, the abs of every action hero, the riotous interrogative performances of Landon Cider, and hundreds more. “Tom of Finland is a state of mind,” Blake said. And we’re all living in it.

In Their Own Words: “Tom was creating alternatives. It’s not that super masculinity was the answer, but it was something that wasn’t there,” Dehner says. “And so he proliferated that, in a form that made sure that his men were homosexual. They were kissing, having sex, and there was a clear message that they were happy. That was his message.”

Surface Says: Tom of Finland’s idea of pleasure doesn’t have to be yours—but it proves that yours can change the world.

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In 1977, ten overseas bankers established a members club in Hong Kong. Called simply the Club, it became an indispensable hub for industry leaders’ professional and hospitality needs. Now known as the Hong Kong Bankers Club, and managed by the Hong Kong & Shanghai Hotels Group’s Peninsula Clubs & Consultancy Services, the home-away-from-home for the region’s financial elite sports a new home by local firm In Situ & Partners.

Sprawling some 22,000 square feet within the Nexxus building, a tower in the heart of the city’s Central Business District, the club compounds historical Chinese and British influences with the retro-futurism of 1970s club chic. An entry escalator rises in a tunnel lacquered in auspicious red and gold, with brass inlays and mirrors designed to lift the spirit regardless of the day’s market performance. “We had to create the moment when you are disconnecting from normal life,” says In Situ & Partners founder Yacine Bensalem.

This blissful disconnection carries into the amenities, including a timber-screened terrace bar and an interior one of fluted, patinated copper topped with black Sahara marble and lit by famed designer Koichi Tanaka of Lightlinks. A pair of dining options are the true dividend. The Treasury offers Western cuisine in a Western-inflected blue and gray room of velvet and padded leather, with walls boasting gold-framed lithographs of local environs. The Dragon, meanwhile, looks East, with Cantonese cuisine served in a fresh take on Chinese banquets, complete with chinoiserie-upholstered chairs, walls clad in wood boiserie panels, and high-gloss lacquered doors. Both are sure to reward interest to the club’s 2,000 members.

In a surreal series of photographic prints, the South Africa–born artist choreographs a fluid transition from woman to ostrich, whose farm-sourced feathers wield subtle spiritual power in the Western Cape.

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Robin Rhode, 46, Berlin and Johannesburg.

Title of work: The Ostrich Lady (2022).

Where to see it: Lehmann Maupin, New York, until Feb. 11.

Three words to describe it: Ancient, playful, elegant.

What was on your mind at the time: To visualize an effortless transition between the ostrich feathers attached to the bicycle and how it began to be absorbed onto the body of my female figure, allowing her to transform into the Ostrich Lady. Since the bicycle is a woman’s frame, I wanted to create this organic transformation between this animalistic object and my protagonist. The bicycle is a living entity in this work—an animal of stature being the ostrich—and our woman figure undergoes a metamorphosis to become an ostrich too.

This unique bird holds a spiritual and medicinal healing power in South Africa. Ostrich feathers were held in high regard in ancient Egypt as it was believed to represent purity and divine truth. A further essential role of this bird’s magical status is rooted in associations between ostriches and ideas of celestial rebirth.

As more is uncovered about the capabilities of AI systems like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E, the debate about their potential impact on the creative industries continues to flare. Some proclaim the “death of art” and fear workers trained in analog skills will lose their jobs. Others theorize AI will spark an explosion of innovation if used correctly. That scenario, of course, hinges on artists finding inventive ways to make the AI work for them rather than against them. No matter one’s perspective, AI has reached a point of moral vertigo: “the uneasy dizziness people feel when scientific and technological developments outpace moral understanding.”

Discourse is brewing about AI’s impact on creating art, but what about the curatorial process? The University of Oxford’s Internet Institute is seeking to answer this question through an exhibition called “The Algorithmic Pedestal,” on view at London’s J/M Gallery through today, that juxtaposes Instagram’s algorithm with human curation by artist Fabienne Hess, who was invited to select images from the Met’s Open Access collection corresponding to the concept of loss.

SinCa Design is a furniture design studio founded by wife and husband Maria Camarena and Dave Sinaguglia. The couple is known for their humble aesthetics, meaningful designs, and meticulously hand-crafted furniture using traditional woodworking techniques.

Surface Says: SinCa’s “less is more” approach embodies the studio’s dedication to thoughtfully crafted sculptural furniture.

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