EJ Son
Fountain

EJ Son’s Fountain imagines a metaphorical solution for the ‘constipated heart’—a term the artist uses to describe a clenched (typically cis-male) soul incapable of emotional expression. In this presentation for Artspace, eleven bidets face each other in a circular assembly, each releasing a pressurised jet of fluid.  

Son’s work increasingly lingers in sites of abjection, arousing an uneasy humour through their use of silicon body castings, limp, oversized teddies with hidden cameras, and, in this case, a ring of supercharged bidets. Within psychoanalytic theory, abject objects are parts of the self that we wish to cast off or make ‘other’, including substances that leak out from the body’s openings and orifices. They may technically be interior—biologically part of the human organism—and yet unrecognisable as such. Abjection, then, is a disturbance to the binary rules of incorporated and excluded, that is, alive and dead, him and her, us and them, me and it. Son is drawn to this destabilising ambiguity. For them, Fountain ‘embraces this contradiction, transforming repression into propulsion and blockage into circulation.’  

From 22 September 2025, a new version of the installation emerged. Beset by malfunction and leaks, Son’s grand water feature now stands dry and motionless, accompanied by an iPhone playing looped footage of the work in operation. As the artist writes, ‘Fountains and toilets are objects we half-expect to fail: clogged, leaking, taped off with “out of order” signs. Their failures are part of their identity. In this sense, the malfunction of Fountain is not an accident but a continuation of its logic’. In its second stage Fountain is comical and contemplative: a monument to systems that fail. 

Son’s Ideas Platform exhibition is accompanied by a new artist book, Confessions, which gathers reveals key references from their personal archive and texts by the artist. Both projects are part of the eighth annual collaboration between Artspace and Parramatta Artists Studios (PAS), a partnership that supports curatorial dialogue, mentorship and advocacy for artists in Western Sydney.