A review of Joshua Kon’s ‘Rarely Touched, Often Held’
By Lance Teo

This is a winning entry from the fourth Art & Market ‘Fresh Take’ writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.

What exists within the nostalgic obscenity of ‘Rarely Touched, Often Held?’ This first exhibition of burgeoning artist and photographer Joshua Kon embraces the intimate details of boyhood, returning us to the cusp of puberty. His exhibition leads us through a homecoming, one in which we are at once intimately familiar and tragically distant. In his work, Kon renders sex education, or lack thereof, in all its dysfunction, a product of confused puritanism and an aversion to the sensitive topic. Every boy must go about his sexual journey alone, poorly guided, and his process will undoubtedly be confused. Kon delights in tonal shifts, exploring the confusing and often contradictory multitudes that come with self-discovery. Shaded scenes of erotic suggestion are placed against exaggerated vignettes of sexual misunderstanding, the sensual pleasure of the viewing juxtaposed against the brute simplicity and inelegance of the act itself.

Fittingly, the process of sexual awakening is crude, confused and comical.

'Rarely Touched, Often Held' by Joshua Kon at starch, exhibition view. Image courtesy of the artist.

Opening the exhibition’s nondescript doors, his photographs lead us up a staircase. It is appropriate that the subject of our birth into sexual self-discovery is the toy. Kon and his friends pose with these sexual aids, misused in a fit of teenage pique and an unwitting dearth of understanding. And indeed the artificial nature of the toys, as realistically as they appear, renders young sexuality as flat, ultimately concerned with the appearance of being.

Joshua Kon, 'Rarely Touched, Often Held' series. Image courtesy of the artist.

They are clad in distinctly coloured pieces of underwear, evoking the iconic Super Sentai Warriors, also known as the Power Rangers. These “Super Hentai” Warriors are barely clothed, posing in the sandy beaches of Singapore, but this may not be mistaken for eroticism. They are merely boys, uncertain, platonically unaware of their own bodies. The sex toys are merely props, and not extensions of sexual fulfilment.

Ascending past these images, we are returned to the platonic childhood bedroom. A beanbag chair lounges in front of a television, old Japanese reruns of Super Sentai programs on its staticky screen. This symbolic sanctuary is, of course, the place within which the boy finally discovers himself. It is a place that views the innocence of the past nostalgically, with a posed picture of Kon and his friends displayed.

'Rarely Touched, Often Held' by Joshua Kon, exhibition view. Image courtesy of the artist.

The childhood bedroom, still containing the remnants of a boy’s pastime, is revealed to us in a flash of red, depicting lust in its tinted lens. The masturbatory aid, still gilded in a beatific gold, is an inverted holy grail. This palimpsest of childhood innocence displays it as a fraught ideal to begin with. The obscene has been there this whole time. Amidst the luridly crimson violence of this photograph, the sex toy is the only thing that takes us back to the childhood tones of yellow and orange.

A boy tucks his penis in between his thighs. He is in the process of changing, of growing and being, as the stretch marks may suggest. He can almost pretend this is what the female genitalia might look like, if puberty’s bloom of hair did not speckle his thighs. The boy is aware of how his body exists, and of other bodies that are not his. He can no longer be the innocent he once was.

Most of Kon’s photographs are warm, tinted in the yellow-orange of a sunlit afternoon that never was, dripping with nostalgic longing. In this latter series of starkly-lit bedroom scenes, Kon recreates the erotic intimacy of the boudoir. He places hands, clothes, and the body itself contorted towards its explicit goal. The penis is always flaccid, spent and thus impotent.

In the flash of sudden light amidst a darkened room, we recognise this moment of sexual vulnerability, of the unornamented urges that need to be subdued. We recognise the loss of a certain innocence, a body that is now coloured by sex. We also recognise that innocence to be idealised and imaginary, the body has and will always be sexual, but for our perception of it. We could not have gotten here on our own. Kon led us here. But indeed, we all have already made this same journey, in one way or another.

The very nature of obscenity lies in its ability to shock traditional understandings of decency and morality. What therefore becomes obscene is that which grates against the Damoclean spectre of common decency. In this state, of being defined by what it is not, the obscene becomes something that resists the tyranny of the mundane. As the US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously claimed on obscenity, “I know it when I see it”. That which relates to the obscene becomes then a reflection of the individual, the “I” that sees, free from the constraints of the public. Kon’s work liberates us from the taboos that impede the exploration of our bodies and their inherent sensuality.

Joshua Kon, 'Rarely Touched, Often Held' series in book form. Image courtesy of the artist.

In a little corner, Kon has all of his photographs, more than those on display, printed as a book. Cheekily, he adds a pristine piece of tissue paper to the end, for us to clean up after the climax.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M or the prize sponsors.