3 August - 23 August 2023

Hello sexy dear i kiss ur full body

Victoria Yujuico Keet

Continuing her investigation on visual culture through their historical and contemporary contexts, Yujuico Keet explores the intimacies of sexual digital imagery in Hello sexy dear i kiss ur full body. Confronting censorship and the representation of sexuality in mass media, the exhibition presents paintings, illustrations, and multi-media works drawn and selected from a barrage of found images online. These depictions continue to portray the body across social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, onlyfans, in advertisements for sex services, and pornography, among others. The exhibition’s title is from a popular meme that shows an Instagram post, which features William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s After the Bath (1875), where a nude female is standing while leaning on a rock. This image prompted comments from men offering indecent proposals to the subject of Bouguereau’s painting with one of them telling the painting, “Hello sexy dear i kiss ur full body”. This has piqued Yujuico Keet’s interest in the way we respond to these representations.

The artist observes that consuming these images is mainly done while inhabiting private spaces and creates an installation that simulates a domestic dwelling. Inside, a somewhat more intimate abode in the shape of a small bedroom is found as the viewer is encouraged to experience and gauge the politics of gaze, which the artist relates to the intersecting dilemma of voyeurism and the censorship of the creative work. Hello sexy dear i kiss ur full body is interested in the public’s response to this reproduction of images in an era where realities are equally defined in the physical and the virtual realms. 

What might have been assumed as liberated formats as Instagram, for example,  favors attractive and sexually charged female content while many artworks depicting the sexual body have been banned. The exhibition defies the unexplained and often vague rules these platforms follow in the prohibition and permission of the images that present the body, sexuality, and being. Who makes these parameters and injections of the standards versus the ideals? The exhibition proposes the introspection of these consistencies and tendencies. 

Victoria Yujuico Keet (b. 1988) attaches contemporary subject matter to art historical tradition; the artist illustrates how various modes of representation communicate the biases of their eras and their continued influence on how images are consumed. Yujuico Keet studied Fine Arts at Byam Shaw School at Central St. Martins and History of Art at University College London. Hello sexy dear i kiss ur full body is her second solo exhibition with MONO8 following, Imagined Islands in 2021.

Selected Works from
Hello sexy dear i kiss ur full body