JJ Chan
Working across and amidst sculpture, moving image, and writing, JJ Chan’s work draws from lived experience and stories stolen from eavesdropped conversations to explore the edges of our realities in constructions of identity. Through storytelling and world-building, this work (re)searches for an alternative space beyond aggressively progressive capitalist time, seeking new worlds from the ashes of the present.
JJ’s work seeks an alternative way of being and of seeing. At the foundations of their work and (re)search, is an investigation of portraiture and self-portraiture which seeks new cartographies of gender, identity, and collecting, sited at the boundaries between the authentic and the imaginary. JJ works towards contributing to artistic enquiries on race, gender, diaspora and portraiture, and towards the discovery of a new kind of imag(in)ing. This work is consolidated through its synthesis with studio-based teaching, bringing it to bear on the urgent sociopolitical and ecological challenges we face today through mutual and collective teaching and learning relationships underpinned by collaboration. The art school is a collaborative student/teacher endeavour allowing us to explore the most urgent emerging enquiries pushing against the cultures of today, holding at its core the values of academic research; that of the urgency of new discovery and its contribution to the future of knowledge.
JJ is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London.