DANCING ON MY OWN

A young writer riffs on family, race, fashion, dancing, and relationships.

Wu, who is involved in a variety of museum-curation projects, weaves himself in and out of this bold collection of seven densely packed personal essays. The title comes from a song by Swedish singer Robyn, who also appears throughout the text. “A Model Childhood,” focusing on his mother, ranges widely: clutter in his family home and the need to organize it and let stuff go; getting along with relatives; video games; family shopping at Costco; Maggie Lee’s film Mommy, about her mother’s passing; Ken Okiishi’s photographic collage Wish I Were Here; and an installation Wu put together of stuff from his parent’s house and his imagining of the closing party he’d give with dancing and Robyn singing. “For Everyone” is about “cultural consumption” and the author’s experience working with art and living artists as an intern at the Whitney Museum, while questioning whom museums are for. In the same piece, Wu expresses his desire to get a popular unisex Telfar bag made by a young Liberian American designer whom Wu then profiles. In “Vaguely Asian,” the author delves into what it means to be Asian through the lens of the art fashion collective CFGNY. At a music festival in New York City, Wu describes the dance floor environment as a “place you couldn’t resist and the one you attempted to avoid at all costs.” Among numerous other topics, the author explores his experiences with drugs; clubbing in Berlin; dating apps, Ching Ho Cheng’s psychedelic painting Chemical Garden and its place in “queer ecology”; and Tseng Kwong Chi’s “selfie’s” photo art. Wu closes with a wistful piece on his visit to Istanbul and James Baldwin’s time there.

These smart, sly essays will appeal to lovers of both pop and museum culture.