Cinematic Voices
CalArts, Bijou Theater
FILM/VIDEO: Fiona Tan is an artist working primarily with film and video. She is best known for her skillfully crafted and intensely moving installations, in which explorations of identity, memory and history are key.
Fiona Tan initially became known for a body of work that relied on the use of archival films, questioning the observer and the observed and challenging the assumptions of the colonial past. Portraiture has been explored in various works combining an analysis of its art-historical and sociological context with how time influences our perception of those portrayed. Recent works concentrate on how memory is connected to images in our mind and on how inaccurate and yet creative memory can be. Throughout her work Tan shows a continuing interest in the motivations of the traveler or explorer. The question how we represent ourselves and what mechanisms determine how we interpret the representation of others, are repeatedly being investigated, revealing what is behind and also beyond the confines of the image.
Both poetic and subversive, Tan’s work is characterized by great attention to detail, accomplished editing of sound, word and image and the careful use of the sculptural space and architecture in which a piece is presented. These elements combine to produce a sensory experience equal to its intellectual content. The elements of man’s existence – our sensual impressions, the interplay of memory, knowledge and image, and our awareness of time and space – seem to collide and merge into one intensified experience of being. Tan is, as one writer put it, an artist of ‘images that refresh the gaze.’
Early works such as Facing Forward (1998) have been analyzed from a post colonial perspective, while her explorations of the portrait genre address notions of the self and the complex status of the portrait as a medium of representation. Countenance (2002) and The Changeling (2006) have been discussed within the discourse on the archive and archival principles. Notions of painting seem to surface in her use of colors, the visual richness of the images and the quiet, timeless character of the viewing experience. Whilst the spatial concerns that lie at the heart of how her installations are conceived, recall the concerns of sculpture.
Tan has participated in many international exhibitions including the Documenta and the Biennales of Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Sydney and Yokohama. In 2009 Tan represented The Netherlands at the Venice Biennale. Her work is represented in numerous international public and private collections including the Tate Modern, London, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the New Museum, New York.
Fiona Tan lives and works in Amsterdam. She is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
Program
Ascent (DCP, 2016, color, sound, 80 mins.)
The beautiful and mysterious Mount Fuji is the site for an adventure of the imagination for a western female artist and her soulful male Japanese correspondent. We go on a metaphorical journey with them up the mountain, crossing geographical, temporal and cultural divides. Employing a collection of dazzlingly varied still images spanning the history of photography, the mountain becomes a breathtaking cultural monolith, inspiring the artist to uncover different paths and to muse on the significance of its dominant presence in Japanese history, religion and philosophy. By combining fiction and documentary, the film is able to explore the intersections between Japanese and Western art and popular culture, from Van Gogh’s passion to the perspectival simplicity of Japanese designs to Hokusai’s woodblock print of ‘The Wave’ that adorns tea towels and drinks coasters around the world. There is even the saviour-monster, Godzilla, who battles with the US imperialist equivalent, King Kong. Evoking both the insight and lyricism of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and emotional complexity of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Fiona Tan’s wonderful film captures the paradox of existing in time and space without movement. Profound stillness.
—Helen de Witt, London Film Festival
Visual artist Fiona Tan’s Ascent is a collection of still photographs edited together that mirrors the construction of film as a single image at a time. The only difference is that Tan threads together still moments as opposed to the liberated movement of the filmic imagery, both within the frame and in its connection to the preceding and succeeding images. Ascent’s study of Mount Fuji in stillness offers not only an aesthetic experience, but one that touches upon the very nature of the still image. Tan has created a film that addresses a multitude of ideas, from our perception of stillness and our innate propensity to create movement in stillness, to the reasons we are aesthetically drawn to the form of a particular image.
—Geoffrey Macnab, Sight and Sound