Peek through the curtain. In a dimly lit, derelict room, two energies, purple and green, are copulating on a broken baby bed. The viewer becomes a voyeur. IV Chan has set a stage for the viewer to impose their own fantasies. Violently entwined, the energies resemble fragmented flesh, pushing into one another so deliriously that they spill and ooze out from the confines of the bed into the room.

The Good, the Bed, and the Snuggly explores one of humanity’s most primal urges, the erotic, drawing on key ideas from Georges Bataille’s Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. To Bataille, eroticism is an inner experience that distinguishes humans from animals. To achieve the erotic is to reject the end goal of reproduction, a refusal made literal in the broken crib. The sex drive is a drive to death: we yearn to transcend our lonesome individual existence, searching for our lost continuity by joining with another. Death and violence are inherent within the deliberate loss of self at sexual climax, where the personality dissolves and instinct takes over. The two forms merge into unity so fiercely that their ‘flesh’ is squeezed to the point of bursting, invading their surroundings as a destructive force.

Another distinction between the human and the animal lies in the taboo. Animals have no limits and no prohibitions, while human sexuality is always bound by rules delineating what is permitted. Through actively transgressing the taboo, we transcend into the erotic; the conflict between the negation of the forbidden and our natural urges fuels the intensity of our erotic desire. Situating the sexual act on the baby bed intensifies this transgression, generating a constant dissonance between the collision of sex and childhood innocence. This is pushed to the extreme with the allusion to the infant, the purest state of being and thus the furthest away from sexual desire. Stickers stuck throughout with phrases recalling baby behaviour – ‘Suck My Toe,’ ‘Cry Louder,’ ‘Fresh Milk’ – now slip into the realm of sexual innuendo.

A further taboo surrounds sex during childhood, which is instilled through education or, more commonly, through the avoidance of the subject entirely. The constant referencing of childhood in the soft, stuffed ‘toys,’ tinkling toy rattle inserts, childish phrases stuck all over, is where the two usually separate spheres of sex and childhood clash. Through desiring the little death, we experience the plethora of life. Bound by taboo, this state of collision and rupture becomes a scene where repressed childhood memories seep through to rejoin our adult selves in our subconscious fantasies.

IV Chan’s work unsettles the body as a site of social control, desire, and transformation. Her practice resists social homogenization while exploring alternative ways of understanding the body within societal structures. Her work foregrounds taboo and repressed desires, interrogating them through the lens of psychoanalysis. Across anthropomorphic soft sculptures, installations, photographs, and performances, she engages with abjection, body politics, femininity, motherhood, and mythology, bringing the “problematic body” into public view, prompting viewers to reimagine the body and its psyche.

Chan received a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, a Post Graduate Diploma in Visual Art from Goldsmiths University of London, and an M.F.A. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Notable exhibitions include Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile, Hong Kong (2026), Ford Foundation Gallery, New York (2024), solo exhibitions and presentations at Para Site’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong (2023) and Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021), and commissioned performances at Art Central, Hong Kong (2025) and M+, Hong Kong (2025).