“Fiona Tan Terminology”
Exhibition: Artist Talk
At Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
July 20th / 21st, 2014

“Fiona Tan Terminology”
Exhibition: Artist Talk
At Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
July 20th / 21st, 2014

栗栖美樹
Introduction
Okamura Keiko (OK): I’d like to begin with a warm welcome to everyone
who’s gathered here today. We will now begin our introduction for the “Fiona
Tan: Terminology” exhibition.
Fiona Tan was born in Indonesia, raised in Australia, and pursued an art
education in Europe. Currently based in Amsterdam, she works internationallyas a leading contemporary artist. Since the beginning of her career in the early
90’s, Fiona has presented video installations, together with a wide range ofworks dealing with the moving image. Moving or still, her works involve a
deep contemplation on the topic of imagery.
It’s only recently that film and video works have become a regular fixtureof art exhibitions. Fiona’s career over the last 20 years coincides with a time
when the moving image gradually began to gain ground as a genre within
the circle of fine art, solidifying its position alongside more traditional andconventional practices. Fiona Tan is considered to be one of the leading artistsof this advancement of moving image within the field of art. As a museum
specializing in photography and the moving image, we are thrilled to have thisopportunity to hold a solo exhibition of Fiona’s work【fig.1】.
fig.1

Fiona Tan (FT): Thank you for coming. As with all video exhibitions, myshow requires some time to view. Though it might seem unusual to say as
much, I consider myself a sculptor––in my case, time being the main material
that I work with.
To briefly introduce my background, I’ve been living and working in
Amsterdam for over 20 years now. This solo exhibition is constructed aroundfour major works that embody different positions and viewpoints that I’ve
dealt with in my career. In this sense, this exhibition is not thematic, but
presents the key viewpoints of my oeuvre.
OK: I would first like to touch on how and why we chose the exhibition
titles––“Fiona Tan: Terminology” in English, and “Fiona Tan, Manazashi no
Shigaku (poetics of looking)” in Japanese. We decided on the English title
first. However, this term proved less intelligible when translating directly into

38

Fiona Tan (center) Photo: YAMANAKA Shintaro

Japanese. After discussing with Fiona, we decided to reexamine this term froma different standpoint and came up with the Japanese title––a reference to thepoetic aspect of the moving image. The starting point of the exhibition was
the concept of terminology, which was something that initially came up in a
discussion with Fiona【fig.2】.
FT: “Terminology” is perhaps rather unusual for an exhibition title; we cameacross it inadvertently. Keiko created a list of concepts related to my work.
Based on this list, we then discussed what kind of exhibition and catalog wewould create. The list included words such as “time,” “light,” and “action”
among many others, but at the top was the heading “Terminology Fiona Tan.”I was looking at this list and thought, “Why don’t I call my show this?” I also
wanted to do something different for the catalog and settled on creating a
glossary of terms with corresponding images and short texts. My work deals a
lot with visuality and looking at images and I consider myself to be an imagefig.2
Poster for the exhibition designed by MORI Daishiro

maker however, I also work with texts and words. I like to consider video as asort of poetry in motion and I consider the “poetics of looking” in relation tothis idea.
OK: Since this is Fiona’s first mid-career exhibition in Tokyo, we wanted
to show the multiple layers and facets of her body of work, along with its
underlying themes. The glossary of words acts as a guidebook that introduces
the many “entrances” and “exits” for viewing the exhibition.

May You Live In Interesting Times (1997)
Kingdom of Shadows (2000)
OK: This exhibition consists of a total of ten works: eight on view in thegallery and two early documentary films which are a part of the screening
program in the film theater. I’d like to first ask Fiona to talk about one of her
early documentary films May You Live In Interesting Times as this can also
serve as an introduction to her background【fig.3】.
FT: May You Live In Interesting Times is a filmthat I worked on between 1995 through 1997.
It’s about my family and my search to find out
where I came from and who I was, though I no
longer ask myself such questions. I come froma mixed background: my father is IndonesianChinese and my mother is Australian. As ayoung adult, I found this quite confusing.
Being born in Indonesia and growing up in
Australia, by that time I had already changed
fig.3

Still from May You Live In Interesting Times

countries and languages a couple of times in
my life.
I moved to Europe when I was 18. I

39

first lived in Germany for four years and then I moved
to Amsterdam, where I’ve been living since. Moving to
Amsterdam was what particularly confused me and shook
me up. I speak four languages: English, Indonesian, German,
and Dutch. It was when I was learning Dutch that I became
tongue-tied: I couldn’t think because I couldn’t decide what
language to speak. This is when it became very clear to me that
language, identity, and culture are strongly interconnected.
For example, when I speak in Dutch, my voice is a different
pitch then when I speak another language. I almost feel like adifferent person when speaking a different language. For me,
this was unsettling; it made me feel schizophrenic.
Another film included in the screening program is my

fig.4

Still from Kingdom of Shadows

fig.5

Lift (detail of installation) Photo: YAMANAKA Shintaro

fig.6

Still from Lift (16mm film)

second documentary film, Kingdom of Shadows, filmed
three years after my first documentary, which deals withphotography and its collectors【fig.4】. Through this work,
I wanted to find out why I liked photography so much, andalso on the other hand what was problematic about it, which
are both very big and important, but also difficult questions toanswer. I don’t know if I managed to answer them very well,
but this was my attempt to do so.

Lift (2000)
Lift, Stills (2000)
OK: Moving on to the works in the gallery, Lift, the first workin the exhibition, is part of the museum’s collection【fig.5】.
FT: I made Lift in 2000 which marked the turn of themillennium and the beginning of a new century. It was a very
optimistic time in Europe. This led me to think about the startof the previous millennium, also an optimistic time before thestart of WW I. It was the era of the invention––the moment of
the discovery and development of photography, and also, thedawn of cinema. Looking at old photographs and early footage
from this era, I realized that there was also a great fascination
toward aviation and this led me to contemplate the pioneering
spirit of the earliest aviators.
I think that dreams of flying are something that just about
everyone has. I have memories of flying in my dreams as achild––not very gracefully; it was more like swimming. Deep
down everyone has a desire to fly and I realized this throughmy work. The source of my inspirations are not always easy
to pinpoint but I suddenly had an image of being lifted up by
balloons. I realized much later that this idea had come froma book I’d read in my childhood based on the famous French

40children’s film Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon).
Images can be easily forged nowadays with image
manipulation but I wanted to actually follow through with thisidea and this was a lot more difficult to figure out. I initiallyconsidered having someone else carry out the task of flying sothat I could film but I realized that I could never forgive myself
if the person flying had a big accident, so I braced myself forthe occasion.
The project was realized in January 2000. I remember it
being quite cold that day. The experience didn’t feel dangerous;
fig.7

Lift, Stills

Photo: YAMANAKA Shintaro

I was up in the air literally feeling as light as a feather. I chose aday where there was little wind however, this plan still proved
to be a challenge for my friends who were supporting me. I
went up into the air attached to a 40-meter rope that was not
fixed to the ground. My friends we’re supposed to pull meback down before I would fly away. What I hadn’t realized wasthat unless you’ve had an experience with flying, estimating thealtitude of something directly above is rather impossible. In thesecircumstances, my friends struggled to figure out the right time topull me back down. Had they failed, I would have flown off【fig.6】.
As you will see in the exhibition, the performance is divided
into three parts––before, during, and after the flight【fig.7】. I
don’t think I’ll say anymore because it becomes clear when you
see the exhibition.
OK: There’s a series of works made around the year 2000 inwhich Fiona herself makes an appearance. Roll I & II (1997), partfig.8

Roll I & II

of the collection of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary
Art, Kanazawa, is one such work. For Fiona, her appearancesin her own work don’t have any special meaning【fig.8】. Rather, the decision
comes more from a circumstantial necessity such as the one she explained for
Lift. The way these works employ the body and the meanings Fiona’s appearance
gives to the work are interesting themes to consider when viewing the work.

Disorient (2009)
FT: The second piece in the exhibition is Disorient. This is a big jump in termsof the year the work was made; there’s nine years in between. I must add that
this exhibition is by no means a retrospective that looks at my career and workin a linear way. My work doesn’t follow a directional progression in the firstplace. I don’t set out a plan, conceptually or mathematically, of exactly where
I’m going. The work grows organically, like a cloud or a spiral. I also frequently
go back to the same themes and preoccupations.
Disorient is a work that I presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, when I
represented the Netherlands. It was filmed on location in the Dutch Pavilion
in Venice. The work is based on Marco Polo’s The Travels, written nearly 800

41years ago––something I believe he wrote for fellow travelers,
tradesmen, and merchants like himself. What particularly struck
me about this text was the way Marco Polo treats and describes
the world as if it’s a shopping mall.
This work consists of two screens, which are placed diagonally
opposite of each other, with two different sound tracks playing
simultaneously. The first screen plays images of what I imagine to
be Marco Polo’s private museum, or the depot of his museum, if
he was able to bring back what he saw on his travels on the Silk
Road through the Middle East to China and on the sea route backto Venice 800 years ago.

fig.9

Still from Disorient

Marco Polo was away from his country for 24 years fromwhen he left at the age of 17 to when he returned at the age of
41. It was a nice coincidence because when I was working on this piece I wasapproximately the age when Marco Polo came back from his travels. Also at
the time of Polo’s travels, Venice was extremely well known for its connection
to the East. What you see on the screen was filmed in Venice in the Dutch
Pavilion where I presented the work. The location was important––I wanted
to locate the work temporally, geographically, and socio-politically on this
precise venue.
What you see on the second screen is footage put
together of real events that I’ve filmed either on location or
have sourced from archives. It’s a sequence of documentary
footage from the countries that Marco Polo claims to have
traveled through on his way to China. The second footage
takes objects Marco Polo was interested in and may have hadin his museum, and shows where they come from and how
they’re produced in our time. Here, parts of the text fromThe Travels has been translated into Japanese and operates asa voiceover for the work. In this work, I’m trying to bridge

fig.10

Still from Disorient

thousands of kilometers of space and hundreds of years oftime in one room, and at the same time trying to deal withcurrent issues regarding global economics【fig.9, 10】.
The last thing I’ll say about this work is the title. As you may know, thetitle refers to two opposing terms commonly used in English: “Orient andOccident,” meaning “East and West.” It’s not for any reason that I call thiswork “Disorient.” The title is also a play on words: It refers to the word
“disorient” which means to “lose a sense of where you’re going.” At the sametime, the prefix “dis-” implies denial, so “disorient” also alludes to the act of
cutting off or negating the Orient.
OK: One thing I noticed about this work was how synchronized the narrationand the video was. Was there a lot of meticulous edited involved in achieving
this level of synchronicity?
FT: Yes, the editing was done in an extremely precise manner. What you hear42

are excerpts from Marco Polo’s book The Travels. He describes in minute,boring detail, just about every single place he visited during his three-year
journey to China. It’s truly fascinating in its boringness. The book is like a
travel guide for merchants, which understandably would speak as though
things are permanent. For us, 800 years later, we could pretend that weknow better but I believe we still think in a similar manner. The narrative
corresponds with the footage and covers locations of present-day Georgia,
Babylon, Yemen, India, and Japan among others.
OK: In addition to the cultural aspects of the different places he describes, I
found it interesting that Marco Polo frequently makes remarks on the beautyof the women as though they’re a commodity.
FT: He also talks about many animals that were unknown to Europe at thetime. For example, he describes a rhinoceros and calls it a “unicorn.”
fig.11

Still from Provenance

OK: I believe this work deconstructs and reevaluates the likelihood that ourdefinition of the Orient remains largely based on the misinformation Marco
Polo brought back from his travels.

Provenance (2008)
OK: The next work in the exhibition is Provenance, which was presented at theDutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale along with Disorient. This piece is oneof Fiona’s many works dealing with the theme of portraiture through video【fig.11】.

FT: Provenance was commissioned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam andis also a part of their collection. In preparation for this piece, I researched
Dutch portrait paintings from the first half of the 17th century. Studying themany paintings in the museum’s depots inspired me to create silent, black andwhite film portraits of people in my close circle. I’m very fond of this “local”
approach. Painters of the 17th and 18th century frequently painted their closefamilies and neighbors in the same way.
More broadly, this work is an investigation of the differences between theexperience of looking at painting and the experience of looking at video. It also
explores whether it’s possible to capture the essence of looking at a painting
through video. I hope that I’ve succeeded in approaching painting’s potentialof transcending time through this work.
And indeed, as you mentioned, many of my works deal with portraiture.
Provenance directly addresses this theme in the sense that it looks directly at
people and their faces. Perhaps Disorient––the previous work I mentioned––
could be seen as a portrait of Marco Polo’s mind.
I’d like to briefly diverge and talk about Vox Populi, Tokyo (2007), which
was the starting point for Provenance. This work, comprised of a wall piece43and a publication, is a different type of portraiture【fig.12】. I did
not take the photographs in this work: They’re photographs fromprivate photo albums of about a 100 different households locatedacross Tokyo.
I’m very grateful that these people let me borrow their photo
albums. After making a selection, I scanned the photos andarranged them as a large wall piece. Rather than a portrait of anindividual, this work is an attempt to create an unofficial portrait ora cross section of Tokyo. It also questions how photography works
in relation to its subjects.
This unofficial portrait of Tokyo consists of many beautiful andfig.12

Fiona Tan discussing about Vox Populi, Tokyo Photo: YAMANAKA Shintaro

fig.13

Provenance (detail of installation) Photo: YAMANAKA Shintaro

intimate photographs of the city’s residents. These are photographsof people I’ve never met and do not know, but whose images I’m
in love with regardless. This was also something that interested
me when I did research on early 17th century portrait painting
for Provenance: in the same way as with Vox Populi, Tokyo, I liked
looking at the images despite not knowing the subjects.
The question I asked myself when I started working and doing
research for Provenance was why we like looking at portraits. Why
do we like looking at faces of people who we don’t even know? As
an artist working with photography and film, I was also questioning
the difference between looking at a face through painting andlooking at a face captured through lens-based technology. I film ina very uncinematic way––you could perhaps call it “photographic.”
I film people just sitting down and doing nothing. This anachronistic way ofworking expands time. It makes the viewer look more closely at the work, andalso encourages them to confront and consciously think about the idea of time
【fig.13】.

At the time, I was very interested in thinking about if it is possible to lookat a video on a wall as if it were a painting. Painting a portrait requires much
more time than taking a photograph or video. However, the intention for
the work wasn’t necessarily to copy painting. A painting has its own unique
beauty, which I enjoy, but by no means do I mean to simulate that. Rather,
I was asking myself if I could achieve a similar effect which painting has on
the viewer which is to slow down people’s perceptions and open them up to
engage more carefully with images and consequently enable a much deeper
viewing experience.
On another level, this work is a personal portrait of Amsterdam. It consistsof six people within my direct environment including my closest friends andfamily. This approach may give the impression that this decision was takenout of sheer convenience or laziness, but it is in fact a result of careful thought
and intention. Painters in the 17th century employed the same approach. For
example, Rembrandt painted his son, his wife, and his neighbor so I felt that it
was permissible for me to do the same.
OK: Considering its relation to portrait painting, I’m interested in why this44

work was presented in black and white.
FT: Deciding on whether to shoot this film in color or black andwhite took a long time. I premiered this work in the gallery space of
the Rijksmuseum right next to where masterpieces by Rembrandt
and Vermeer were exhibited. This obviously put me under a lot ofpressure. I was very nervous about having to show my work in suchclose proximity to these revered artists. I was also concerned that if I
presented my work in color, people would assume that I was trying
fig.14

Still from Inventory

to copy these painting.
I’m also fond of images presented in black and white. It’s
interesting that this medium makes the images less realistic and thus somehow,
more honest. The first thing you notice when you see a black and white film
or a photograph, is the fact that it’s black and white. Monochrome images
make the viewer very conscious of the fact that the image was captured
through a lens. You immediately register that these images are not reality but
a representation of a moment that once was. By presenting my work in black
and white, I wanted to demonstrate that my interest was not in showing off
my close friends and family per se, but instead in the images as media.

Inventory (2012)
OK: The last work in the exhibition is Inventory, which I asked Fiona toinclude in this exhibition. This work deals, in a very profound way, with thecentral role of the museum, which is to collect, conserve, and exhibit artifacts.
What are your thoughts on this theme?
FT: Museums are in fact a relatively recent invention: they’ve only existed forabout 200 years. In Disorient, I built a large set and filmed what I imagined to
be Marco Polo’s private museum or the depot of his museum. I’ve found that
I’ve become increasingly interested in the history of museums and collections.
One of the fundamental questions that I’m attempting to address is: “What is
a museum?” or to put it another way: “What is a collection?”
Currently, the most common image people have towards a museum isthe architecture. However, a museum is just about always a collection. The
starting point of a museum is the collection. The building
is something that follows suite. Nearly all collections
start out as private collections, and the collection shownin Inventory is an example of one of the earliest publicmuseums. Architect Sir John Soane built up a private
collection and displayed it in his own home in London.
In 1833, a Private Act of Parliament was passed that ruledthat his house would remain untouched after his death.
It’s a wonderful experience to go and walk inside hishouse. It’s almost like being in a time capsule: It’s as if he
fig.15Still from Inventory

had just walked out the door【fig.14, 15】.

45

Sir John Soane’s collection is very physical. The majority of the collection
is Roman or ancient Greek, consisting of plaster casts, sculptures, fragmentsof old marble, as well as many other antiquities. It’s a very eccentric collection;
all jumbled up and mixed together. His way of exhibiting these works was also
idiosyncratic. For example, he would hang two of the same copies next to its
original. I found myself thinking a great deal about the difference between thephysical object and the immaterial, about what an original and replica is, andwhere the essence of the art lies.
Since my intent was to make a commentary about media itself, I decided
not to choose just one medium but to show an array, or an inventory, of themedium that I work with. This is why the work is composed of six different
projections, each one dedicated to one particular medium of film or video.
This presentation has as much to do with nature of the medium that I workwith as with the images that were filmed. Choosing film and video as mymedium of choice puts me in the fortunate (or unfortunate) position of
having a new media forced upon me every five years. When I prepare for a
new work I usually conduct tests to decide which medium to film on: whether
it’s going to be film or video, digital or analog. Besides the technical aspects,
this work is a careful choreography of still and moving images. And without
going into too much detail, I’ll also say that it is a narrative about mortality.
I’m fortunate to be currently showing my work in three spaces in Tokyo––
here, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Mori Art
Museum, and Wako Works of Art, the latter two in Roppongi. However,being here to speak about the work is a bit difficult for me, because I believethat having my audience engage with the work is what’s really important.
So what am I doing here talking about the work? I don’t want to replace theexperience of looking at the work for you with this talk. I want all of you toexperience that for yourselves.
OK: There’s no specific way to look at Fiona’s work: You don’t have to have any
specialized knowledge, nor do you have to abide by a certain interpretation.
We hope that the visitors will really take their time to look at each workthrough their own perspective while drawing on this discussion as a point ofreference.
Fiona’s work can in no way be reduced to a singular theme. Indeed,countless themes are inherent in her work. It was through thinking about thismultidimensional aspect of her work that led us to the title “Terminology”
for the exhibition. It’s also for this reason that we repeatedly emphasize theimportance of looking at the work from many different perspectives. The
exhibition catalog also provides possible interpretations of the work through80 keywords, such as “physicality,” “gaze,” and “archive.”

Q&A
Q: Sir John Soane’s museum is particularly known for its characteristic use of46

light. His distinct use of light definitely comes through in your work. Did you
work solely with natural lighting or did you add artificial lighting to shoot theimages? I also would to know if you had an interest in the architecture itself.
FT: I filmed this work entirely with natural lighting. I thought that it was
extremely important to do so since this was what Soane was well known for.
As for your second question, I intentionally did not try to capture Soane’sarchitecture through my work. I decided to focus more on his collection,
because I was interested in his relationship with Ancient Rome. Visiting themuseum is a fantastic experience. You enter a very elegant, stately house in the
middle of London and suddenly encounter, at the back of the building, a very,
very cramped space that contains an amazing collection. This kind of unique
is impossible to capture in film.
Q: You must have picked out and amassed quite a large amount of artifacts
to create Marco Polo’s collection for Disorient. I’d like to know if there are any
anecdotes you could share regarding the making of the collection.
FT: Realizing this work was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. I
decided that it had to be filmed in Venice, so we transported two truckloads
of stuff which was transported by truck, then by ship. We built the set in threedays, filmed for three days, took the set apart and took everything back. I
didn’t want the collection to be just historically accurate. I knew that I wanted
anachronistic elements such as things from recent times in the work. If you
look carefully, you’ll see lots of unrealistic elements in the collection like a
portrait of Mao Zedong or television sets. Another thing that I wanted to do
through the work was to evoke the viewers’ materialistic lust.
Q: In your commentary on Lift, you mentioned that you weren’t sure where
your inspirations came from. How do you want your viewers to be inspired byyour work? And how do you maintain a balance between the artist’s intentions
and the viewer’s interpretation?
FT: The first part of your question, which I believe is inquiring as to how
I want my audience to be inspired, is difficult to answer. I don’t want toprescribe or force a point of view on my audience. What I’m hoping to do in
my work is the complete opposite. This doesn’t mean that I’m being vague or
indifferent towards how my work should be seen. I’m not saying “Any reading
goes. I don’t care.” It’s a very fine line: I’m very precise about what I want toconvey and I meticulously plan how my ideas will be communicated in mywork, but at the same time, I don’t want to dictate what you see. There is aframework. However, I want the audience to have the freedom to experience
the work for themselves and choose what value and meaning the work holds
for them.
I want to also point out that how you experience the exhibition is in fact
very fluid. You might come away with something completely different when47

you’ve seen the exhibition for the second time. Every time I make a new
exhibition, I experience my work in a different light. This is the great thing
about art and visual media. The art itself is unchanging, but the way weexperience it is always in flux.
Q: I saw Vox Populi, Tokyo at Wako Works of Art. This work is constructedfrom many photographs and is a complicated piece. I personally felt a rhythmin the way the photographs were configured. Was there any particular rule thatyou had when putting this piece together?
FT: This work is a kind of inventory in that it has to do with classification.
The work itself is made up of many narratives. What happens when you
look through thousands and thousands of images is that you begin to noticecertain patterns: birthdays, marriages, baby pictures, family members sleeping,bathtub pictures, people covering their faces because they don’t want to be
photographed, and of course in Japan, people holding up the peace sign. I
consider these themes—which seem to naturally emerge—to be like islands,
which I then plotted across the wall. This work is like a storyboard in someways, but unlike film it’s something that progresses in a non-linear way
because the viewer can look at the wall and make their own story as they lookthrough the work. The works elicits a lot of identification––people look at the
pictures and think, “I’ve got a picture like that.”
OK: I’d like to end the Q&A here. This exhibition is something that can beviewed in a very short amount of time, however, I believe that the “poetics
of looking” manifests when the audience chooses to stop and confront what
Fiona is offering through her work. The most important aspect of Fiona’s
work is not just the images: It’s also how one chooses to perceive and engage
with the work. The poetics of looking or, in other words, how you engage
with and relate to the work can really change the experience and make it
more meaningful. This is the beauty of images that transcends physicalworks and time. I’m truly delighted to be able to present to you Fiona’s work,
which presents this aspect of images, while maintaining openness to theinterpretation of the audience. Finally I’d like to thank Fiona for discussing her
work and the exhibition. Once again, thank you all for coming.

This text is a compilation of two lectures, one as part of the press conference and theother for general public, by Fiona Tan in Tokyo on July 20th and 21st, 2014 as part of the
opening program for the exhibition, “Fiona Tan Terminology.” The lectures were held withEnglish- Japanese translation by YOKOTA Kayoko.
[ Edited and translated by AISO Nobuko ]All works and images appear courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London; Wako
Works of Art, Tokyo.

48