Fiona Tan Coming Home

Fiona Tan Sherman Art Foundation Contemporary Coming Home Fiona Tan Coming Home Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Contents in association with the National Art School 12 Preface Anita Taylor Fiona Tan 14 Introduction Gene Sherman Coming Home 19 Colour Plates A Lapse of Memory 47 Disorient 74 Essay Infinite Crossroads Juliana Engberg 82 Production Credits 84 Artist Biography 88 Artist Bibliography 92 Contributors 94 Acknowledgements 13 It is with enormous pleasure that the National The extension of the project to include the Preface Art School (NAS) joins with Sherman NAS Gallery is a direct outcome of discussions Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) to involving the Deans/Directors of the three present ‘Fiona Tan: Coming Home’. The major art schools in Sydney in May 2009, held proposal to extend the project – commissioned at the invitation of Dr Gene Sherman, in which Anita Taylor by SCAF – across our two venues represents a Gene and her team at SCAF proposed an Director significant new partnership for NAS. I believe ongoing dialogue to explore opportunities to National Art School the opportunity afforded by this collaboration engage more extensively with the art students establishes an exciting new direction for both of Sydney. Most importantly, SCAF and NAS our organisations. share a commitment to supporting outstanding The two Sydney venues are each hosting a exhibitions that underscore the value of art and separate body of work: Disorient, 2009, first culture in our society. shown to great acclaim in the Dutch Pavilion at The hard work, commitment and dedication the 53rd Venice Biennale, is screening at SCAF in of a number of individuals are required to Paddington, and A Lapse of Memory, 2007, is deliver an exhibition of this scope. I would like being shown in the NAS Gallery in Darlinghurst. to thank especially Dr Gene Sherman, Anna Fiona Tan is a leading international artist. Waldmann, Amanda Henry and Dolla Born in Indonesia, she grew up in Australia and Merrillees of SCAF; Katie Dyer, Curator /NAS now lives and works in the Netherlands. Tan is well Gallery Manager; Danielle Neely, NAS Gallery known for her film-based museum installations, Intern; the installation team; and the staff of archival constructs and photographic works that NAS. Most importantly, we extend our deepest explore and interrogate collective memory and the appreciation to Fiona Tan. construction of identity. Grand in scale, acutely intimate in observation, the works of Fiona Tan demand both space and time to absorb, to reflect and to distil the richness of their visual examination and meaning and to situate our own experience in relation to them. Beautifully executed and skilfully crafted, Tan’s work has, perhaps, a particular resonance within the historical and contemporary context of NAS, which is housed in the old Darlinghurst Gaol (1841–1912). As a site of historic significance, the former prison is redolent with history and memory, the traces of which can be seen inscribed within its walls. As we educate the next generation of artists, the philosophy of the fine art education on offer here is that of a strong commitment to the teaching of the traditions of each subject discipline in order to engender skills, facility and confidence in each individual. These qualities of observation and skill, and an engagement with the tracing of history and memory, of past and present, closely correlate with the underlying themes in Tan’s work. 15 September 2001, Yokohama, Japan: the city’s initiation rite wherein twenty-year-old women Introduction Triennale of Contemporary Art promised to engaged in a coming-of-age archery ritual. The be variously illuminating. The usual line-up of artist had chosen to focus exclusively on the international artists was thoughtfully integrated young faces – images of absorbed concentration into a complex arrangement of local and – forgoing full body views, the targets and Dr Gene Sherman emerging practitioners, housed in a series of overall context. Chairman and Executive Director wharves in this design- and art-designated city The artist’s oeuvre, I later discovered, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation port. Australia was admirably represented by comprised a subjective visual anthropology Shaun Gladwell (nurtured and represented founded in photographic and filmic by Sherman Galleries) and an exceptional representation. Tourism has, in part, distorted large-scale work by compatriot Craig Walsh. our view of the world. Exotic places are I was there to support Shaun, to mediate sanitised, homogenised and reconstructed in his work for collectors, identify future order to market their saleable assets. Fiona opportunities, and interface with curators, Tan’s creative journeying was based on the critics and press to maximise the experience for perception of otherness and the desire to the artist and validate the confidence placed in explore identity in all its current and traditional him by both government and my own gallery. complexity: Tuareg, 1999, archival footage of Time to see the sprawling overall show was North African children; Countenance limited but essential in order to absorb and (Documenta), 2002, 200 filmic portraits of evaluate the overall context within which Berliners; Correction, 2004, 300 portraits of Shaun’s work was selected. I moved through male and female prisoners and prison guards in the exhibition rapidly, encountering new work California and Illinois; Vox Populi, Norway, by well-loved artists, dismissing perceived 2004, collected portraits of hundreds of attempts at innovation, pausing briefly and unknown Norwegians drawn from scanned passing impatiently. images of temporarily donated family albums, I was stopped in my tracks by a compelling meticulously sorted, edited and composed. moving-image work – Saint Sebastian, 2001, by Le tout Berlin, the Norwegian nation, the Fiona Tan – a rotating rollcall of young, unfortunately burgeoning American prison traditionally dressed Japanese women, filmed population; Fiona Tan’s work relies heavily on with bow and arrow in hand, concentrating on documentary filmmaking with anthropological unseen targets. The title resonated. Saint perspectives. And yet, using existing footage, Sebastian, martyred for spreading the Christian her own film footage and an irrepressible desire message, whose images, venerated by the gay for ordering, classifying and foregrounding community, I had scrutinised when devouring types, archetypes and stereotypes, the artist Yukio Mishima’s monumental tetralogy, The gently and insistently, with subtlety, urges us to Sea of Fertility, during my two-year reading consider who we are and how we fit into the stint of contemporary Japanese literature. overall category of humanity. Mishima’s fascination with Saint Sebastian In September 2008, seven years after my first extended to photographing himself in poses encounter with Fiona Tan’s work, I travelled, reminiscent of the Christian martyr’s death. again in haste, from my short-stay base in The Tan images remained with me and over Amsterdam to Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in the years I pursued both the background to the pursuit of another Tan work. Tomorrow, 2005, work I had seen and her work in general. It was included in an important group exhibition, appeared that she had fought for and won Be(com)ing Dutch, curated by Charles Esche permission to film a Kyoto-based annual and Annie Fletcher, with the overt aim, it seemed 17 to me, to explore, explain and expand upon the The Tan family’s forced migration from It is our great pleasure and privilege to present group of experienced, dedicated individuals changing make-up of contemporary Holland. President Suharto’s 1960s Indonesia to Fiona Tan’s work as our first 2010 SCAF artist’s make our ambitious projects possible: Laura Fiona’s work again stood out. Tomorrow placed a Melbourne, Hong Kong, Holland, Cologne, project. Originally we talked about an early 2009, Brandon, Aaron de Souza, Barry Sechos, Mark group of teenage Swedish students in a large- Norway and further afield is relatively well water-themed commissioned work for Sydney. Gowing and Fiona Egan contribute in essential scale horizontal line and left them shuffling known – and in today’s global village meshes The exhibition was postponed as a result of and meaningful ways to our events and projects. uncertainly, interacting awkwardly, posing, with thousands of other dislocations, Fiona’s invitation to represent the Netherlands at Thank you all for past efforts and in posturing and pretending to be comfortable in displacements, business forays and voyages of the Venice Biennale. Disorient’s significant impact anticipation of the timely and successful their shoes. Blonde, traditional, European types discovery that mark the era in which we live. in Venice and relevance for our part of the world delivery of SCAF’s 2010 programme. were clearly outnumbered by students from Her own travels take place in both time and led to the decision to feature and contextualise To Brian Sherman AM, our patron and my varying backgrounds. All clad in youth’s space and are represented in picture worlds, this work in our Paddington space, while also life partner of forty-two years, and to our ubiquitous jeans and tee-shirt combinations, they both present and historical. The portrait is the partnering with the nearby National Art School children and their partners, thank you for your read as individual portraits and as a collective medium through which her exploration often (NAS) to screen A Lapse of Memory,

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