Virtue Village: Village Porn

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Larger than a hamlet, smaller than a town: the traditional village comes to mind as a cluster of physical spaces, agrarian and neighborly. Horses and oxen live nearby, chewing on local grasses; figures mingle freely in small courtyards and gardens; within hermetic houses, couples grow into families, families into clans.

Yet how can this concept of “village” be updated for the conditions of contemporary, globalized communities? Clashes between the individual and the collective deconstruct notions of the communal as homogenous society. The replacement of rural animalia with machinery and cyborgian identities lends itself to new horizons of transhuman existence. The ancient ritual is commodified as charm and trinket, and yet there is still magic in the act of gathering, of transformation. In our post-internet, post-human world, what does it mean to build, live in, and reproduce as a village?

These themes foreground the first major solo exhibition of Virtue Village, in which the gallery is transformed into a neighborly estate of queerness, referencing the long histories of gay villages as sites of anti-capitalism, counterculture, and safe spaces away from violence and death. Instead, fornication becomes a metaphor for generative and artistic possibilities, and loosely demarcated areas—the village town hall, the village scholar garden, the village ritual grounds—invites participation by those who choose to engage.

Entrance to the village is through a new tableau vivant, RUSH (2022)—named after the recreational popper used in gay sex acts—where figures are seen pleasuring themselves against a scenery of religious iconography and pastoral tropes. Subverting the monocultural narratives seen in the works of old masters such as Hieronymus Bosch, RUSH merges the saintly, the taboo and the pagan, giving agency and visibility to pleasure as an erotic right.

From there, visitors may wander through the village of queer delights. Paintings of mythological, dreamlike sequences of transhuman desire and sex populate the space as visions for a more inclusive love. Gently rusted sculptures, treated with the same chemicals found in poppers, ritualize the transformative nature of the drug. In the “garden,” a love swing, ornately decorated, reveals the mouth and anus of a tardigrade—a microscopic, almost indestructible animal—as an uncanny manifestation of Paul B Preciado’s radical “flesh ribbon” in the essay “Anal Terror,” opening up the orifical passage and rejecting the heteronormative impulse to “redraw the body, designing outsides and insides, marking zones of privilege and abject zones.”

Virtue Village’s ideologies come to fruition in the central installation Machinal Dysphoria (2022), in which a motorcycle torso is constricted with Shibari rope. Produced in collaboration with artist Aka Chow, Machinal Dysphoria challenges normative thinking around flesh and erotica, transcending the human body into a radical cyborgian co-existence. A culmination of the artist duo’s investigations into broader spectrums of queerness, the work decentralizes hierarchical structures and values love and sex across all species and machines.

Wed-Sat 1pm-6pm; by appointment only

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Virtue Village (est. 2020, based in Hong Kong) is a philosophy, an epistemological ideology, and an artist duo comprised of Joseph Chen and Cas Wong. Named after old public housing estate blocks in Kowloon City, the home of Chen’s grandmother, Virtue Village root their practice in contemporary spirituality, transforming found object, environments, and the body into vessels for parabiotic communion. Tapping into the multiple definitions of ascension, they navigate the planes of collective queer subculture, fetish, and transhumanism.

Virtue Village has exhibited works and screened films at Negative Space (Hong Kong), Parallel Space (Hong Kong) and Present Projects (Hong Kong). In 2021, they organized the performance platform and exhibition, 活體洞, in Hong Kong.