Vertical White

Tan’s father is Chinese-Indonesian and her mother is Australian. She grew up in Australia and studied in Germany and the Netherlands. Her multicultural background led her to seek out family members scattered around the globe and interview them for this film.

Through a grey blanket of clouds, we barely discern the contours of Mount Fuji, a volcano with many faces. 4,500 exceptional and diverse photographs from the past 150 years form the basis for Ascent. Made entirely with stills, it is a filmic experiment balancing between documentary and fiction, photography and film, where an English woman and her deceased Japanese partner, Hiroshi, lead the way. As Mount Fuji is climbed across geographical, temporal and cultural divides, the narrative unfolds, exploring unexpected paths.

As a voice reads letters from a father to his daughter off camera, 20th century archival images from the Netherlands are shown. Fiona Tan touchingly explores what potential emerges when sound and image diverge.

In reframing and re-editing existing ethnographic films, Tan exposes their anthropological underpinnings and questions the conventions of filmmaking. What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? How can one ever know another? The voice-over, a fictional dialogue taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, may offer an answer. The explorer Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan are speaking about travel and looking back on the past, when Polo observes, “The traveler recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

‘…I lose my bearings. But after all, is that such a bad thing?’ - FT

Saint Sebastian was filmed by Fiona Tan at the annual ‘Toshiya’ in Kyoto, a coming-of-age ceremony for women aged twenty in 2001. It was for the first time ever that a film camera was allowed to capture the procedings. Dressed in traditional kimono hundreds of young women perform the Japanese art of archery in a ritual that has persisted for over four centuries, combining female grace and beauty with the typically male skills of physical and mental strength. The monumental video installation is presented on both sides of a large single screen which hangs diagonally in the exhibition space.

With a static camera Tan films the dense night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her temporary studio location at the Getty Center. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. The space is flattened, and the viewer is unsettled. Shorn of a narrative, Vertical Wide is part of a trio of video works that are a series of dream-like moving pictures.

In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters, he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.

Transporting the viewer to a very different time and place, Nellie is inspired by the life of Cornelia van Rijn, Rembrandt's illegitimate daughter, who at the age of sixteen emigrated to Batavia (present-day Jakarta). Little is known about Cornelia's life; no portraits of her are known to exist. But this omission from the history books was for the artist an opportunity to give her imagination free reign. With this unsettling work Tan offers a touching homage to a forgotten woman, whose 'suspended history' becomes activated again.

A confused old man, Henry, lives on his own in an old empty building that is reminiscent of a deserted palace. Henry hasn't been outside for years. The camera follows a day in his life - his simple daily chores and his eccentric rituals. Henry looks like a European from a good family, but has many Asian habits. The second protagonist is the building in which Henry is staying: the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. It is one of the best preserved examples of chinoise architecture and furnishing in the world. Neither the client nor the architect had ever set foot in Asia. In a monologue, a parallel narrative unfolds in a game with reality and fiction. Word and image, fiction and documentary become intertwined with each other and point across the frontiers of ‘East’ versus ‘West’.

With a static camera Tan films the dense night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her temporary studio location at the Getty Center. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. The space is flattened, and the viewer is unsettled. Shorn of a narrative, Vertical Red is part of a trio of video works that are a series of dream-like moving pictures.

A reflection on the passing of time.

A three-panel video installation commissioned by the Rijksmuseum for the exhibition Monomania, curated by Fiona Tan.