Pornotopia (series) (2025 - ongoing) is a virtual environment created in Unreal Engine 5. Drawing on objects and domestic spaces that are both lived and imagined, alongside interiors found in archival erotic magazines, the series rethinks the equation HOME = SAFETY = AGENCY amid intensifying anti-immigrant politics in the UK. Developed from the artist’s experience of navigating the country through a queer Asian body, the work considers how hostility, dissociation and a lack of ownership over public space produce a desire to construct safety elsewhere. Across the series, shifts in scale unsettle familiar relationships between bodies and architecture. Gigantic and miniature figures do not simply represent power and powerlessness; their changing proportions allow the house to appear protective, restrictive or exposed. The visual dynamics of big and small become a way of abstracting existing power relations and imagining how they might be subverted. Through scale, movement and viewpoint, Pornotopia loosens fixed positions of dominance and vulnerability, asking how agency might be reconfigured within structures already in place.
Details
Pornotopia, scene walker as part of CONTROL, 2026 at
OHSH Project, London
My practice examines how identity is produced, performed and made legible through space, appearance and social relations. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture, sound, performance and digital media, I explore questions of being, belonging and individual agency as shaped by systems of regulation, projection and perception that often sit beyond one’s control. Informed by lived discomfort, my work moves between public space, subcultural environments, domestic interiors and speculative worlds, often unfolding through aesthetics of pressure, extremity and pain. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from BDSM, rave and club subcultures, as well as DJ mixing, I explore how established structures of power can be disrupted and reconfigured through pleasure, consent and intensity.
In 2025, Chaney was selected as an awardee of the third edition of LOEWE FOUNDATION/Studio Voltaire award. Selected exhibitions and performances include Back of House/Front of House, Piccalilli Gallery, London (2026), FAN の BLOG 迷妹の部屋, Asymmetry Art Foundation, London (2024), How to Destroy Angels (curated by Tai Shani & Anne Duffau), Horse Hospital, London (2024), Acal Festival 3 (curated by Studio/Chapple and SON OF CRAFT), Staffordshire St Gallery, London (2023), if splash has your whistle, IKLECTIK, London, (2023) and Kaugummi im Motherboard, gr_und Gallery, Berlin, (2024).