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.
