Tomorrow night, inside the King’s Bedchamber at the Royal Museums Greenwich’s Queen’s House, NEO 10Y’s music video for ASCETIC HEDONIST will play against walls shaped by centuries of monarchy. The event, Fierce Queens: Unframed, Unstitched… Unapologetic!, has already sold out. That detail matters. A space built to stage dynastic power is opening itself to queer South Asian self expression.
The Queen’s House has long been associated with order, proportion and inherited authority. ASCETIC HEDONIST moves differently. The title alone suggests friction, restraint set against indulgence, devotion intertwined with desire. NEO 10Y’s work often lingers in these contradictions. His art resists easy categorisation, drawing from spirituality, club culture and diasporic memory without flattening any of them. In the context of a royal bedchamber, the video’s meditation on the body and transcendence lands with particular force. It invites viewers to reconsider who has historically been allowed pleasure, visibility and narrative control.
Fierce Queens, held each year in historic Greenwich, brings together performers and historians for a night centred on queer liberation and LGBTQ+ representation. This edition, Unframed, Unstitched… Unapologetic!, promises to move beyond static portraits of identity. Hosted by drag king and queen Adam All and Apple Derrieres, the evening features cabaret, a Bold Mellon Collective gallery takeover and Queer History Club. Curated by Dhaga, the King’s Bedchamber becomes a Queer South Asian Gathering, intimate and celebratory, with gentle making circles, digital showcases and space for gender expression and adornment.
Within this framework, NEO 10Y’s involvement feels layered rather than incidental. He has a relationship with the institution. He previously headlined Diwali at the museum, performing CHOOSE LOVE and ONENESS, foregrounding unity and spiritual expansiveness in a heritage setting. He was also photographed and featured in the South Asian Pioneers exhibition, his presence woven into the museum’s evolving story about who shapes British culture.
ASCETIC HEDONIST builds on that trajectory. The video does not dilute itself to suit the setting. Its aesthetic remains bold, contemplative and sensuous. Showing it in the King’s Bedchamber shifts the room’s meaning. The space becomes less about royal privacy and more about collective reclamation, about bodies and identities once pushed to the margins taking up visual and emotional room.
Dhaga has earned a reputation for curating gatherings people return to because they feel like home. Tomorrow, that sense of belonging will settle into a building synonymous with hierarchy. In that convergence, NEO 10Y’s work reads not as spectacle, but as a confident assertion that queer South Asian art belongs within the nation’s most storied interiors.