GOD SAVE OUR SOULS
june chan
july 2025
GOD SAVE OUR SOULS was site-specific exhibition by June Chan, using the female body as both alphabet and altar. Across a series of coloured-pencil portraits and hand-drawn tea towels, nude women contort into letterforms that spell out the exhibition's title, a phrase lifted from prayers, anthems and language of the institutions that have long claimed authority over women's bodies. The letters "G," "O," and "D" in the front window are set against backdrops patterned after Catholic tile-work. The remaining words inside the gallery, "SAVE OUR SOULS," are drawn on tea towels and hung across the space on laundry lines, a material choice made in direct response to the gallery’s setting inside a working laundrette. Within their letterforms, the tea towels carry patterns drawn from tiles found throughout Hong Kong, where Chan grew up. “The patterns I recognise from cha chaan tengs (the post-war British-inspired diners that populate the city), as well as from the public housing estates and old buildings of my childhood. In these spaces, colonial inheritance and domestic life have always been layered atop one another. By letting the work absorb its surroundings, turning domestic objects, feminised labour into a vessel for the sacred and the bodily, this body of work asks who is really being saved, and from what.”
June’s practice reflects on her own position as a woman of colour navigating the legacies of religions, culture and a socio-political climate that continues to treat women's bodies as territories to be governed rather than lives to be trusted. “Drawing on the comics and cartoons of my childhood, I work across drawing and painting to fold humour and nostalgia into an eerie psychological depth, using the objects and rituals of everyday life as anchors for narratives about feminine strength. Transforming the personal into a quiet, unbreakable declaration, reclaiming the tea towels.”
June Chan lives and works in Southeast London and is drawn to the area's close-knit creative community and people who make it feel like home. “It felt fitting to bring this body of work to FABRIQ Gallery, a space rooted in the everyday fabric of the neighbourhood which has shaped so much of my recent practice.”
