Visitors to the artist’s latest show will have found anything but – perhaps that’s the point
Anyone expecting an erotic frisson from Lee Kit’s Porn should prepare for disappointment. Despite the title’s racy promise, the Hong Kong-born artist’s show is, for the most part, a rather chaste affair, the content economical, the attitude pensive, dispassionate: two serene paintings; two understated, text-centred video projections; two spare assemblages, provisionally constructed from humble domestic items. Sensual pleasure is largely subdued, sublimated through nebulous, lulling imagery. In Progressive failure / Equally unremarkable / Consider it normal (all works 2025), a projection onto a spraypainted steel surface, the three lugubrious title-slogans appear, one by one, amid tufts of blue, pink and purple clouds, words fading in and out within the cumulus swirl. (Throughout Kit’s ethereal mixed-media art, clouds are common tropes.) The painting Porn and its companion a smile w disgust continue the sky-gazing reverie, while nodding towards nastier forms of enjoyment: these tall spraypaint compositions picture hazy bands of grey-white cloud against blue-green skies, but on each exquisite surface the jarring titles are lightly handwritten in pastel: the low inscribed on the literally high, delicacy applied to ‘disgust’.
The sweetness and restraint of Kit’s imagery feel like the innocent opposite of porn – just as the emphatic banality of adjacent sculptures declares another type of contrast. Two collapsible laundry racks, simple supports for airing clothes, are here draped with printed T-shirts, each one bearing a dispiriting or downright nihilistic maxim, after which the works are titled. (‘Progressive failure’ and ‘Equally unremarkable’ return – alongside ‘Everything stops here.’ and ‘A funeral for every morning.’) These grim, unglamorous combinations insist on ordinary human burdens: tedious everyday necessity (washing and drying) plus existential finality (living and dying). We are far from the fantasy world of porn, with its avoidance of interpersonal awkwardness, detachment from the complexities of care and conflict, and escape to a world of prescribed indulgence.
Yet even so, some features of Kit’s exhibition are undoubtedly porn-adjacent. There’s the fixation on cleaning: a preoccupation that plays on the idea of ‘dirty’ movies, while conversely pointing towards the repressive, purifying imperative of erotic make-believe. To perfect the fantasy we wash our hands of real-life mess. In addition to the laundry racks, Kit includes the projected video Dirty Hands, an elliptical, text only account of a character inured to the physical actuality of adult entertainment: ‘Having sticky fingers becomes the norm… He’s gotten used to porn.’ Whether he is a participant or consumer remains unclear; his porn life is ambiguous, its representation tensed with contradictions. The narrative centres on situations of arousal and stimulation, but the described sensations are irritation, unease, boredom. And while an infernally jaunty jazz tune screeches on repeat from a tinny speaker (suggestive, we might presume, of a vintage porn soundtrack), the onscreen words are issued like embarrassed whispers: small, neat lines of projected text, positioned low-down and off-centre on the otherwise blank screen.
Kit has previously classed his motivations as more political than aesthetic, and related agitations certainly stir beneath the calm, clean surfaces of his art. As with other unruly energies in Porn, however, political passions tend to be diffused or masked. Covering up ‘becomes the norm’, as per Dirty Hands: tissue paper wraps the steel screen onto which that work is projected; transparent packing tape wallpapers the corner space where a smile w disgust is displayed, adding a gratuitous base-layer of shiny plastic. Perhaps the T-shirts, printed with statements of outward discontent, propose defiant interruption of surface perfection (depending on context, what might it mean to declare ‘everything stops here’?). But then again, set against Kit’s dreamy zone-out scenes, such vague slogans might be fantasies too: up in the clouds, floating free.
Porn at Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin, 1 May – 21 June
