JJ Chan & Friends- Some Forms of Togetherness

Saturday 04 April - Sunday 25 May 2025

JJ Chan & Friends

Some Forms of Togetherness

Saturday 04 April - Sunday 25 May 2025

Where to begin? A kiss, perhaps.

The mouth is a portal that gives and takes.

I open my mouth towards the sky.

The wind has just changed and I can see the specks of darkening pavement in front of me caressed by the drops of rain treading upon them. They are gentle at first then not, reaching and then gripping, in quick embrace. Urgent, they are in desire (or perhaps violence; I can't quite tell) they are quick to become cold. It’s obvious to me that the meeting is between two bodies whose ways have parted for so long that each yearn for the other…

hold on.

The rain falls thicker and I gasp as a drop hits the back of my throat. glunck.

It rolls down into me before I have the chance to swallow.

Suddenly it is me, and I, it.

I imagined the pink of my flesh and the white of my teeth bouncing from its tiny surface, unstable as it shot past my tongue, and the words that hide beneath it. So quickly I am unsure of what are my words and what is the rain: the utterance of a cloud overhead. Am I to embrace the floor?

                                                       

Absorbed instantly by dryness, the succulence saturates in the style of colonial invasion any small hardened lumps of the ground until they flatten out and pool, first into themselves and then into the dampened surface upon which we stand, when, and where, they become apparently one.

Grounded.

As the space beneath my tongue begins to fill - I have lost all certainty here of what are my words, and what is the rain. The rain is now my innermost trembling thought, and resting beneath my tongue, a fidgeting tongue, is a pool of words filling beneath it, glands feeling full, too full - becoming words, uttering, spluttering, words, worlds, shit, it’s too late. I take it back, please, let me take it back. It wasn’t my fault, it was the rain… rolling down into me before I could even swallow. I thought it was a kiss. It wasn’t, I don’t think. I knew it the moment before it began.

I’m not sure that my body is holding its shape, is yours?

Close this hole.

Standing in the mirror, I look into my mouth. I imagine myself as someone else. What pasts can you see ahead of you through this mouth-hole-pocket-locket-cluster-fuck? The mouth speaks, and the mouth sees, the mouth can make, and the mouth can take. Through whose mouth do our little eyes see? In whose vision do little worlds build?

A mouth, a world to see. How often have you looked upon another and seen so clearly diffracted, splaying out-about the light of our own likeness.

A whisper in my navel says, “these ways of talking are not mine.”

It is now one morning in the future. I decided to try and replicate the kiss of the rain in the shower. Steam rising, eyes watering. Bubbled soap slips off the body in the most satisfying way. I realised immediately that it was different. A network of apparently organised pipes bring water to my home, they travel the city and the suburbs to get here and then through the floors and the walls before being heated under pressure and released in constant flow. Chlorinated and caffeinated, its urgency is a different one, becoming fizzled in my mouth. It is loud and amplified in electronic fuzz. It is worse than unchilled sparkling water on a very hot day - the plastic bottle kind. It is bitter to the taste.

The fizz remained for almost three days in my mouth, on my tongue, dancing on my gums, an electric pulse so minimal it could have been dreamt but so present that it could not been ignored twitched along my lips as though I too was becoming water about to burst out into someone else’s face, filling their words with irritation.

I take my fingers to these lips. I trace firmly along the skin; my mouth, erogenous/erroneous. Re-awoken by each new shower.

Where to begin? A kiss, perhaps.

The anus is a portal that gives and takes.

I trace my index finger around its rim for a moment, remembering a kiss: tongue twirling figures of eight, zero, one, eight, zero, one. A funny feeling had shot right through it earlier when I turned on the car radio to meet the song halfway in the middle. An electronic buzz, like a furled poke right into my centre. It wasn’t a song that I already knew, but somehow it felt like it was calling on something past. I didn’t know what chords had already passed by or what words were going to come next. All I knew was that I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not yet. The leather seat  scorched hot from the morning sun, despite rain. Petrichor. Somehow, I was both excited and anxious. Instead of driving, I came home to write.

Grounded.

I wonder, if the anus could speak, what words would pass its lips? What did it hear that I did not? Somehow its opening always seems closed. When tracing the lips of my mouth, I have the tendency to open them slightly apart. The anus has the tendency to pout instead. It pushes out of this little porthole, my love, a glorious matter; a waste like no other, a luxurious food for many and many and many more. It feeds on words from kisses and food ingest. In jest it quivers on encounters with the delicious, the nervous, and the excited.

hold on.

Please… tell me please, what words go past your lips, what tongues give you words and what words do you give to tongues? In humans the perforation of the anus and mouth happen at 8 weeks and 4 weeks into embryonic development respectively. When both the anus and mouth are perforated, the organism becomes topologically comparable to a tiny ring doughnut which is at once mouth, anus and navel. I like to imagine it sugar coated but in reality, it is not. This one erogenous portal allows us to devour and be devoured from here on into our human bodied existences. A portal from one place into the same place, but differently. What does one become, swallowed and expelled, swallowed and expressed?

I wonder how the wor(l)ds still hidden beneath my tongue, might be devoured from its very wet tip, saliva as a kind of knowledge, material, sense and intelligence going on to become via another body a fertilising, nourishing, kind of matter to be holden against already spoken words and ideas already established.

Put words in my mouth, and I shall swallow them whole… eight, zero, one, eight, zero, one. Let me put my words into you, unspoken.

Since the very first sentence was strung together from a gestural series of breaths and contractions, squeezed out of those internal ingestive and digestive ring-lipped portals, ideas have been carried forwards, outwards, and towards powerful ways of building worlds, choreographing movements of matter and matters. At the initial meeting of these erogenous zones, the beginnings and ends are one, drawing us into its middle where other possible worlds collide in explosive possibility, in ruin and creative force alike. Taste it in your kisses. Push your words right into my middle. Hear them whisper from navel to navel…

Words seeking feelings rise upwards into the gut… funny feels nice.

Of course, there is the not insignificant chance (or rather probability) it might also become a harmful, damaging kind of mattering that emerges through these intimate exchanges of creative lust, since not all of our unspoken words are careful and caring.

If only I could display on this page for one single glance, the totality of the world’s entangled realities which flood and flow through and into its own growing labyrinth of many worlds under the skin of a perceivably single body. The perceived absence of any context to this internal architecture is a falsehood, obviously. It is saturated in context, and its context is a parody of its presentation as neutral, as blank, as a receptacle for any objects wishing to uphold their own stories with absolute agency. What happens when worlds are swallowed into other worlds, maintained (sometimes) for the very purpose of that swallowing?

eight, zero, one, eight, eight, zero, one

Whilst it might be considered that the mouth is the orifice of words and ideas, our best words and ideas in the 21st century are seldom spoken through this particular passage. In the 21st century, it is our fingertips prancing around on the flat and slick surfaces of our laptop keyboards, and the slip-sliding-doom-scrolling-double-tapping on glass screens, through which our words and ideas are discharged. Between the digits of binary code, and the digits of the fingers and hands, emerges a choreography of the body, to exert words not least through writing (or typing) but through touch, and through a repetitive learnt kind of poking and stroking. Why is it that ring doughnuts demand one's finger through their middles? The haptic exercise of moving the fingers across the keyboard or the touch screen situate together in sentences both the beginnings and ends of a language (or in other words the middle). What and where and when, and how far does touching touch, and is touch touching?

The navel is a scar affectionately known as a button.

To think relationally is to understand that to exist is a political issue, not least to be an artist. Anxiety is the awaiting  of a new reality of circumstances.

A sense of being at the end of the world.

The pinched oval of the soft navel is a disconcerting eye looking inwards to where the future is held, and outwards to where the past begins, outwards to the histories and realities that demand a responsibility for the future. Our mouth and anus are eyes too, eyes that see, learn and create. In moments of emergence and departure, we are the most together. It is at the beginning and the end that the bond between a child and their maternal parent is the strongest. I saw it in my mother, as her mother left. All creatures are a we before they are an I. This I is less an I for individual and more so an I for implicit, since from first emergence we are implicit in the lives of all others. Implicated by life itself.

What comes out of these holes is anything and everything but mere debris.

Give me a little more time for these chance encounters, will you? For how am I even to begin, in the middle or at the end - the end of course the present, the beginning of course the end. Here we are, here we are, there we go, here we go.

Here we go.

Friends

DOP: Ollie Bradley Baker

Performer: Benji Xu

Runners: Shirley Han, Arthur King

Studio Manager: Ellen Ball

Studio Assistants: Mason Greenwood, Shirley Han, Arthur King

Others

Sarah Howe

Julien

Quench

Kate Davis

David Moore

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