Would you pucker up for art? 😘 A Melbourne artist is collecting kisses. But something is left behind by those kisses: the microbiota of the lips, the invisible ecosystem we host. | nickdmiller
It feels like kissing jelly. The culture medium in the dish, agar, is made from boiled seaweed. The moment is less than romantic, satisfying or fulfilling.But something is left behind by those kisses: the microbiota of the lips, the invisible ecosystem we host. The bacteria tuck into the agar and grow, and flourish into galaxies of life. And Melbourne artist and designer Huei Yin Wong has been photographing them., is about our yearning for intimacy during the long COVID lockdowns and isolations.
She sat down with them and recorded their experience of lockdown, “a chance to reflect on this intense time of enforced loneliness ... at a time when there was a huge emphasis on coupledom”.She got way more than she expected. There were people grieving the loss of a parent or friend, people whose fierce envy of the romantically entangled led them to “just grab strangers off the internet and call them their intimate partner on the first date”.
“It was almost like some weird artistic therapy,” says Huei. “The moment we got out [of lockdowns] it seemed like no one really wanted to talk about their experiences. We immediately wanted to shove this dark time away and not look at it any more. But there was a sadness that sort of grew within us... and a lot of the people I was talking to felt they’d come out a different person. A bigger person.
The dishes sat around Huei’s studio on warm incubator beds, close to body temperature, like some kind of weird pet or plant collection. And the kisses became constellations. “And I’d photograph them after the culture had bloomed to look like the galaxies within us.”