Lee Kit: Porn review – An installation that compels you to stay and sit with it a while longer
Lee Kit: Porn
Mother's Tankstation, Dublin
★★★★☆
I always enjoy a visit to Mother's Tankstation, not least because it has one of the best names for a gallery anywhere in Ireland. An outlier among the industrial buildings of the sprawling Guinness complex at St James' Gate, the gallery is almost impossible to stumble upon. This means that a journey there is always marked by intention – the result of conscientious seeking.
Integral to the curatorial ethos of Mother's Tankstation is its international outlook: the artist Finola Jones, its founding creative force, has spoken about her desire for it to be 'a world gallery that happens to be in Dublin'. That ambition is measured in the range of global artists it shows; many are from the Asia Pacific region, including Lee Kit.
A painter by training, Lee works across multiple media, including video, sound, text and projections. He was born in Hong Kong in 1978; that territory's political volatility means he now lives in Taiwan. Though shaped by his first-hand knowledge of political unrest and militarised rule, Lee's style is anything but strident. He creates quietly charged site-specific environments simmering with subtle emotional frequencies and a wry humour.
Porn opens not with a typical artist's statement but with a short piece of experimental prose – one of Lee's great strengths is his sensitivity to language. Like the best poetry, his writing is both compelling and efficient, evoking a flurry of associations.
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Take his final three lines: 'He simply cannot tolerate himself being incapable of being sensible and critical. He sits there and talks, picking up the fragments of satisfaction scattered across the ground. In the end, porn is for pleasure.' I find my thoughts returning to these gnomic descriptions repeatedly as I walk around the gallery.
Porn is, almost more than anything else, a work of atmosphere. This is literalised in the artwork that greets you at the gallery entrance, Progressive Failure / Equally Unremarkable / Everything Is Normal, a short looped film that repeats these three aphorisms, layered over a mutable background of clouds in the sky. Thoughts appear and then dissipate into the air. Lee raises and then undercuts the notion that liberal democracy is experiencing a unique crisis, gesturing at the hysteria of the media.
Kit incorporates utilitarian objects into his installation in the main space. Two clothes horses face each other, several T-shirts draped on the white metal frames. These carry messages, too, in the place of traditional branding. Some are already familiar; others, such as 'a funeral for every morning', are lucid variations on a theme.
Large-scale spray-paint-and-aluminium works echo the visual aesthetic of the outset, uniform cloud patterns impressing you with their mechanical repetition, becoming abstract and denaturalised. A projection work emits a tinny, almost needling jazz accompaniment, detailing in Kit's inimitable style a prose poem about sticky, dirty hands.
Meanings accumulate and bubble, and though a sense of ambient disquiet is notable, Lee's installation compels you to stay and sit with it a while longer. After all, porn is for pleasure.
Porn is at
Mother's Tankstation
, Dublin, until Saturday, June 21st
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