Some Forms of Togetherness
JJ & Friends (JJ Chan)
05/04/2025 - 25/05/2025
The exhibition will feature a collection of pristine unused, unkissed, red lipsticks, each apparently counting a moment of impulsive shoplifting, collected over time by JJ Chan during their years-long wait for an appointment at an NHS Gender Identity Clinic. As of late February 2025, they are amongst 16,270 people on the waiting list for an appointment at the Tavistock and Portman GIC in London.
The collection is conceived as an active "counter"—counting moments marked by overwhelm, frustration, and the desperate, fleeting grasps for excitement that characterise kleptomania. It counts moments of heightened gender euphoria, and moments of severe dysphoria. It counts individually, and many. Arranged into some forms of togetherness, with a film presented across a collection of old mobile phone screens tucked into the folds of other collections, these disparate counting parts track differing experiences of “real-time” as it passes, becoming entangled in a poly-chronology.
The exhibition brings JJ Chan’s research on collecting and museuming into conversation with a growing interest in red lipstick. Red lip classic, that thing that you like*, is a symbol of sex, power, style, resistance, and the ultra feminine, but it's sticky and stuck in all the troubling visual lineages that entangle whiteness, class, privilege, and transphobia. Shown alongside Josie Ko’s exhibition Mekle Lippis, exploring her own ideas surrounding femininity, beauty, race, and identity in expansive re-readings of archival texts, these exhibitions bring into the same space, some very different artworks, that come together to provoke critical consideration of a speculative reclamation, a repatriation, and redistribution of femininity, across divisions repeatedly drawn across genitalia and the colour of skin.
Together, the artists have reserved a large gathering space within the galleries at Quench, where visitors will be invited to sit and rest, and gather and share; reflect and count on their own experiences, and where other pieces of work, writings, and photographs by JJ, Josie, and their friends, will also be displayed.
*Swift, T. (2023) 'Style (Taylor's Version)', 1989 (Taylor's Version). Republic Records.
JJ Chan’s work takes form under a collective moniker; JJ & Friends, a name that acknowledges the works collective and collaborative authorship with others, some who are named, and others who are not. This approach has led to projects with neighbours, friends, community groups, work colleagues, and students across different but interconnected social contexts. Drawing from lived experience and eavesdropped conversations, they work to explore the edges of our everyday realities and the ways in which we construct our identities amongst others in the world.
Through storytelling and world-building, they’ve obsessively searched for an alternative space beyond aggressively progressive capitalist time, seeking new worlds from the ashes of the present.