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.

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NEO 10Y is a British Asian artist who is best known for his critically acclaimed songs designed to expand love energy and manifest peace on Earth. The performance took place at a time when humanity needed it the most, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza.

The event itself was curated by Mehala Ford, founder of south Asian arts collective COMMONGROUND&. Thousands of guests experienced the event despite tube closures and protests.

As the sun was setting, the lantern parade weaved through the museum’s grounds, ending with a breathtaking performance by NEO 10Y who performed an unnamed new single, as well as his latest release, ONENESS (WHO WE ARE), which helped to manifest peace and love, and build a collective connection to close the National Maritime Museum’s celebration of the Festival of Light.

Top photo by Don Blandford;

Photo with crowd (C) National Maritime Museum, London by Jonny Guardiani;

Wearing custom Alter-X.

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