Fiona Tan

HALL OF MIRRORS
By Andrew Maerkle


Rise and Fall (2009), installation view at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2013. Photo ART iT.

Based in Amsterdam, Fiona Tan makes works that investigate the nature of memory, both as it exists on a personal level and as it is recorded on and circulates through media such as film and video. Combining equal parts lyricism and criticality, her works often draw upon resources ranging from archival ethnographic film and found photographs to the writings of Marco Polo (as well as Italo Calvino’s fantastic interpretation of the same, Invisible Cities).

Tan is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which presents a concise overview of her practice through older and recent works. ART iT met with Tan in Kanazawa to discuss her practice in greater detail.

“Fiona Tan: Ellipsis” continues through November 10.

Interview:


Vox Populi Tokyo (2007), photographic installation. All images: Unless otherwise noted, © Fiona Tan, courtesy the artist and Wako Warks Of Art, Tokyo.

ART iT: From the early videos incorporating archival film footage to the Vox Populi installations of photographs and recent multimedia installations, one characteristic of your works throughout your career has been the incorporation of a kind of curatorial perspective, or a historiographical way of looking at looking. Can you discuss how you built up your own artistic language?

FT: My work is about looking. That’s a truth which is so simple or obvious that it’s almost not worth saying, yet at the same time so elementary that it’s very important to say. This was very much the case in the beginning when I found myself dealing with and reflecting upon found footage and asking, Why am I so preoccupied with the same images all the time? Why do they mean so much to me that I want to continue looking at them again and again and make work with them? Then, in addition to this I was also shooting my own material. So I gave a lot of reflection to questions about what lens-based media is, what it stands for, how it affects the way we think about images, and how images affect the way we make meaning of the world.
Regarding the curatorial approach, I think this comes from researching archives and making my own archives. And then as an artist as you keep making work and get older, you find yourself looking back on your work in a curatorial way. This is actually enjoyable because the relationship to your work changes in unexpected ways. It’s quite nice to review older work and think, Hey, that’s not bad! Did I really do that then! It offers a way of looking at myself with some removal.
Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear to me, even though I’ve been doing it from the start, that as an artist I’m not only making works and installations, but also always working as an exhibition maker, exhibiting what I make and paying attention to how I do that and what sort of story I’m telling in an exhibition. It’s an important part of my practice for me to work with architecture and a given situation and react to it. I’m starting to talk about it more now because I’m realizing it more myself. It’s not only the works, but also what you do with them in the context of your own practice.

ART iT: For the first decade of your career your works were often viewed in the context of post-colonial discourse, but I feel they escape a strictly post-colonial framework.

FT: Writers sometimes have a problem that they become well-known for one book, and then that is the book by which they are known for the rest of their careers, and they always have to talk about that one book even though they’ve written 10 others. I sometimes feel I’m stuck in a similar pigeonhole of post-colonial, multicultural identity. I can’t deny it. I did make that sort of work and sometimes still do. It’s part of me, coming from my autobiographical background, and every now and then I do rethink the relations between East and West, but it’s too limiting to only think or talk about my work on that basis. I’ve been pushing quite hard to say, Yes, that’s there, but I’m also thinking about time, about archives, history – many things in fact.


Both: A Lapse of Memory (2007), HD installation, 24 min, 35 sec.

ART iT: With a work like A Lapse of Memory (2007), for example, to the extent that it touches upon a post-colonial nerve it undermines ideas of historical demarcation between the colonial period and the present, because the apparatus, in the guise of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, is still very much part of the present, however mixed up it may be.

FT: Yes. We’re still stuck in this paradigm of thinking in East and West. With that piece I was trying to think beyond that, but I ended up lost in a no man’s land, as did my main character. I failed, but I could still make a work.

ART iT: In a way, you were curating the building through Henry/Eng Lee’s routines or actions.

FT: The building was the reason why I made that piece. I stumbled across the building, and it was such an amazing place that I couldn’t get it out of my head. I had to do something with it. Then I quickly thought that I have to have someone living there, otherwise it would just be a guided tour of an empty building. I immediately knew who I wanted to have living there, and he became for me a quite real character. Then it was weird because the building is very real, but when I was filming it started becoming more and more fantastical, while my character, who was totally fictitious and just an actor, became more and more real.

ART iT: Both the Henry/Eng Lee actor and the older woman from Rise and Fall (2009) gave tremendous physical performances. You feel the presence of Henry/Eng Lee in this building, which acts as an amplifier for his physicality. Is it a coincidence that both characters are elderly?

FT: It’s not something I consciously realized, but it must be going on in my head. As I get older, I have started to think more about aging, and looking back. I started working on Rise and Fallwith the extremely ambitious goal of showing how I think memory works. Although we don’t really know how memory works, and I don’t really know how memory works, I was hoping to make an anatomy of memory. But the idea was too ambitious and in the end I think the piece is more about forgetting than about remembering; I learned that forgetting is also an important part of the creative process, that you throw stuff away as a way of working through it.
So as I was developing the piece I thought, I have such big complicated ideas that I need to have a fictitious narrative to hang it on. I wanted an older woman who is looking back on her life. And I was thinking about certain ideas of femininity also, ideas of a strong, fragile woman. I started thinking, is there someone I know who would have this presence? Then I almost immediately recalled this woman, a former teacher of mine. She died recently. She was a performance artist – not a professional actor – but I was thinking about her for a long time, and then I heard from a friend that she had been diagnosed with cancer. I thought, I can’t ask her, she’ll be busy with her health. Then I thought, wait a minute, I’m treating her like she’s already dead. Maybe I should ask her, and then she can decide.
Through an old friend of hers I approached her and eventually drove to her house in Belgium, where I explained I was imagining this older woman who’s a writer and looking back on her life. She said, “Ok, I’ll do it. That’s what I’m doing, I’m looking back on my life now” – she had been told she only had three months to live – “but you have to be quick.” I filmed her when she was extremely ill. It was both incredibly moving and very scary. Then luckily she tried a new treatment that extended her life for three more years. But I was so grateful, because if you have someone with only two or three months left to live and she gives you three or four days, that’s a huge amount of time. For me that gives the piece an urgency.


Both diptychs: Rise and Fall (2009), HD installation, 21 min.

ART iT: With Rise and Fall the camera itself was almost like a protagonist. The camera seemed to be constantly agitated, so that even when the woman is sleeping, a nervous energy infiltrates the film. How do you approach the camerawork? Is it spontaneous, or carefully planned?

FT: I think the camera really is an actor in the film. With the camerawork I plan as much as I can, but I also try to leave room to play around and let things happen. It’s important to allow for serendipity. Cameramen will talk about gifts. Sometimes the sun comes out of the clouds at just the right moment, or a dog walks through the back of the shot, and it’s perfect. These are not things you can plan, so you have to be open to seeing them when they come.
I tend to think very visually, so I know exactly how I want it to look, but then I also allow it to develop or change while still trying to hold on to what I had.

ART iT: How do you conceptualize the aesthetic of your camera? There’s a luxurious aspect to the colors and details it captures, but also a gritty closeness.

FT: It’s hard to talk about. I know what I want and I know when I’m getting it, I guess. There’s something about a certain feeling of realness. I want things to feel physical. Some of my early pieces involve very physical shots. For example, there’s the piece in the collection at Kanazawa, Roll I & II (1997), where I’m repeatedly rolling down a sand dune. It was nice for me to feel that Rise and Fall is also very physical, and that comes from the violence of the waterfall. I don’t want images to feel fake or artificial.

ART iT: Is this also a response to the objective viewpoint of the ethnographic camera?

FT: I always talk about that early film footage as my film school. I didn’t study at film school, and never properly learned how to use a camera, so watching hundreds of hours of that material was important for me. It was a pure material, with a quality which is different now. For example, in early nitrate film, the black is very black. It was good to watch that early material and become attuned to that.
And a lot of that early material is silent, with only visuals, and with hardly any camera movement, because the cameras were so heavy, and there were no bases for moving them. It’s quite photographic. People were asked to stand in front of the camera without moving, which is also something I exploit in works such as Seven (2011). All you have is what’s in the shot.


Inventory (2012), installation view at MAXXI, Rome.

ART iT: It seems that your curatorial perspective and your interest in the nature of lens-based media come together in one of your most recent works, Inventory (2012), which was shot at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. How do you view this work?

FT: The work is being presented for the first time now in Rome at MAXXI. It’s a bit like a Russian doll in that it’s a museum in a museum, and a collection in a collection. It’s also an inventory of an inventory, and an inventory of the medium I work with.
Soane, who was a neoclassical architect, was very much in love with ancient Rome. To me, the collection he built up at his home, which is one of the first private museums ever, is like a personal copy of Rome. Moreover, in his collection Soane displayed originals next to poor plaster casts, which are essentially duplicates or copies, anticipating the digital copies of today. I filmed the collection using six different media, which are presented all at the same time. And now I have transported Soane’s vision of Rome back to Rome, from its neoclassical home in London to the MAXXI, which is a pretty extreme example of contemporary architecture by Zaha Hadid, who also happens to live in London. It’s like a hall of mirrors where everything’s bouncing off each other.
So the piece is a reflection on the limitations and the possibilities of the medium itself, but beyond that it’s also an in-depth reflection on questions of what is a museum, where does a museum come from, and why do people collect? I’m certainly not finished with the ideas that went into this work. It’s the start of something that I plan to continue exploring.

Fiona Tan: Hall of Mirrors

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