Channatip Chanvipava (b. 1993, Thailand)
Samak Kosem (b. 1984, Thailand)
Fangas Nayaw (b. 1987, Taiwan)
Tseng Chien-Ying (b. 1987,Taiwan)
Jason Wee (b. 1979, Singapore)
Lu Wei (b. 1994, Taiwan)
Caroline Wong (b. 1986, Malaysia)

When the gallery and I spoke about a possible new exhibition, they had asked about the artists I would enjoy exhibiting next to. I thought immediately of the ripple the skin makes as it tightens up itself into knots of goosebumps while standing in front of a photograph or a drawing, and of the mind as it shivers and shakes off the chill of its complacent and acceptable defaults in order to consider another way of knowing that the artwork before me is offering. The pleasures I experience are not entirely interior but they are modestly scaled – someone standing next to me observing me very closely as I stare at said drawing might see hardly any change, or they might notice that the hairs on my arm or on my neck are standing – and deeply held within the folds of my person, which is a way of saying that these pleasures are what a person lives on and for. They jolt our bodies into motion, and our movements signal that, for all the warnings and dire predictions around the untenability of our current living, at least for the moment we are not yet dead.

it’s the end of the world, let’s dance is an exhibition built around these frissons, that we enjoy on our own or within our circles of kin, lovers and friends. These are bodies shaking in the face of a ceaseless stream of apocalyptic endism that both supplies a paralytic shock which is useful for the those who capitalise on the status quo to maintain it as such, and also suggests the end of resistive joy. The wiggling, contorting, gesturing, munching, riding, posing, vibrating, undulating, touching that are supplied by Channatip Chanvipava, Samak Kosem, Fangas Nayaw, Tseng Chien-Ying, Lu Wei, Caroline Wong, and myself hold two realities together at once in the same space – that our misgivings and unease about the crises of our world are not unfounded, while at the same time we are still learning and rediscovering our capacities for how to move through this world. it’s the end of the world, let’s dance is not suggesting an epicurean withdrawal from civic concerns and wider ecologies into domesticated relations and spaces, or into notions of ‘community’ that are gated or worse, policed. Rather, this is an exhibition as a public dance, and an invitation to consider pleasure as a public concern. Two seemingly contradictory things are possible at once – I have invited these artists and friends to dance with me, anyone can enter the gallery floor to dance together.

Jason Wee