Scotty So
Make Believe - Encounters with Misinformation
State Library of Victoria
16 April 2025 – 26 January 2026
Over the last five years, Scotty So has been working on a body of work that blends self-portraiture, archival intervention, and cultural critique. The Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist’s practice is truly multidisciplinary, developing new ways of looking at portraiture, reality and authenticity. Drawing on the State Library of Victoria’s (SLV) Alma Collection, Scotty’s new work is currently exhibiting in Make Believe: Encounters with Misinformation at the SLV until January 2026.
As a university student exploring drag performance at the VCA, Scotty was inspired by the glamour and visual language of 1930s to 1960s Shanghai and Hong Kong, which developed into a fascination with vintage photography and the politics of appearance. He began to wonder: if drag allows someone to pass as another gender, could visual manipulation also allow one to pass as historically “authentic”? What makes an image believable, and what constructs the illusion of history?
These questions set in motion a body of work that So began inserting images of himself—stylised in drag to resemble figures from another era—into online spaces like Wikipedia. Using analog film photography, digital editing, AI generation, and hand colouring on black-and-white prints, he created photographs that convincingly mimicked antique imagery. Each image was crafted with attention to paper types, tones, and historically accurate photo dimensions, adding a layer of material authenticity to the illusion.
From this point, So’s project evolved into a physical intervention in archival and institutional spaces. Drawing from the State Library of Victoria’s Alma Collection, which documents the history of magic and stage performance, he began referencing figures like William Ellsworth Robinson—a white American who performed in “yellowface” as the magician “Chung Ling Soo,” adopting a false Chinese persona to build his fame. The installation includes genuinely historic photographs from the State Library archive together with So's fabrications, as well as artefacts and costumes either historical authentic ones collected by so or replicas by him or modern manufacturers, that blend the collected and the constructed. By positioning these objects within the conventions of institutional display, the work challenges the archive’s power to assign authenticity, and asks what happens when a fiction is treated as fact.
Through humour, beauty, and theatrical sleight of hand, Scotty So interrogates the aesthetics of trust. He asks how cultural memory is staged, how representation is performed, and what lies behind the polished glass of an archive when no one looks too closely. His work reveals the fine line between history and illusion—and the strange magic that happens when we start to believe in the picture.
