06</3JX Soo
Geylang is a place for lonely hearts, or so we and the systems have agreed, and the framing for desire comes before the place. I went down the main road once, one way, and I did not turn in, kept at the seam between the odd lorongs and the even to look for connection unseen, because that is as far as someone like me actually stands. We were asked to look past the index, past the surface, past the sorting into odd and even, and I could not, because to look past a thing you must know what is behind it, and I knew nothing, none of the grit and desire in these streets. So to stay to document the ‘real’, I took the title's brief at face value, I stayed at the surface than to be a false investigator, and gathered what the place holds up of itself, a heart, a man holding his back, shapes that are stock before they are anything real, and I peered into them, found three, and gave the weightless thing a body. And the pictures begin in the real, and then they drift, one shape to the next by likeness alone, a heart to a heart, a hand to a back, until a story gathers that was never in them, a wandering, a daydream desire that has lost its way. What is told is invented, what is seen is real, and the distance between them is the work. To call it documentation would be too kind; a camera turned on a place it does not know holds not the place but the wanting that carried it there. So the thing I was looking at was the looking. A place for lonely hearts, we said; the loneliest may be the one at the glass, drawn to the light like the moth, and no wiser for it.
JX Soo works across photography, video, text, and sound. Informed by the distance and transience of their formative years across East Asia's cities, their primarily lens-based practice examines representations and artefacts borne of memory, transmission, and circulation.
They are drawn to how narratives — fictional, quasi-fictional, or actual — emerge from spaces of ambiguity, referentiality, and material negotiation, forming personal constructs of land, boundary, and identity. With a background in music, their images tend to resist documentary impulses, fixing instead on colour, primal emotion, and rhythm.