‘Rarely Touched Often Held’ is an honest documentation of intimacy and self-pleasure. I am joined by my coterie on a personal and platonic journey to negotiate our sexual curiosity. Through snapshots and staged photographs, I pen an almost self-indulgent love letter to our friendships and self-discovery since boyhood.
Medium: Book
Dimensions: 17.5 x 23 cm
Originally an attempt to escape from far reaching influence of Anna Atkins on the cyanotype genre, this collection of anatomical illustrations hold no practical value as scientific references. Instead, each image is informed purely by the whims of the illustrator, who were chosen at random from all walks of life.
I ended the experiment after only a month and deemed it a wonder failure. I am eternally grateful to those who participated.
Medium: Cyanotype Prints, Risograph Zine
Dimensions: 9 x 13 cm
“Founded in 2019, the Underground Society was created to unite excavation enthusiasts who sought to practice their craft among like-minded comrades. The Society believes that excavation is the ultimate form of expression and self-affirmation, with membership from all walks of life, including scientists, intellectuals and artists.”
Excerpt from the Underground Society Member’s Handbook.
After a chance encounter online, They Showed Me Their Hole is the product of artist Joshua Kon documenting the activities of the Underground Society, a recreational group dedicated to the guerrilla excavation of cavities around the country.
Medium: Video
Length: 15 minutes 09 seconds
As an extension of the artist’s previous investigations into Singapore’s holistic and secular Sexuality Education curriculum, Practical Biology (not a Biology practical) places the delivery (or exclusion) of key information about our bodies and sexuality via the Science and Biology syllabus under the microscope of inquiry. The work manifests in the form of a student’s worst nightmare – An exam they did not study for. Questions, language and anatomy diagrams appropriated from local secondary 2,3 and 4 assessment papers and previous GCE ‘O’ level exams press the reader for practical day-to-day knowledge on top of academic concepts. It offers a glimpse of knowledge the artist wishes were imparted to him in a scholastic context.
8.3 x 11.7 inches, 28 pages,
Self-published 2023
Edition of 30
Teenage and Gen-Z sexualities have often been characterised or misunderstood as immature, unruly and require guidance of even disciplining. The Ministry of Education’s Teachers Handbook, “The Teenage Years”, was developed to impart mainstream social morals on sex and sexuality in high schools, and which in its earlier incarnations, contained exaggerated fears about the excesses of certain practices such as masturbation. These images play the role of public information posters, meant to disseminate the values of yesteryear.
Accompanying these images is a sultry narration of a passage about masturbation from the handbook.
Medium: Commercially printed PVC banner, audio file
Dimensions: 200 x 150 cm
Length: 4 minutes 7 seconds
A brush with the municipal authorities over guerilla gardening led to a reformative training session at the National Parks Board community gardens division. This video guide was made to help navigate eager gardeners through the cant’s and don’ts of creating their very own green spaces, and the intricate process of starting a community patch for themselves.
Medium: Video installation
Dimensions: Variable
Length: 4 minutes 28 seconds