Fiona Tan Books

Tan Siak Kew's life embodies a unique blend of scholarship, business acumen, and diplomatic duty. As a passionate advocate for education and community development, he held significant roles such as President of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Singapore's first ambassador to Thailand. His bilingualism and commitment to bridging cultural divides positioned him as a vital figure during Singapore's formative years. This biography highlights his contributions and legacy through historical records and insights from those who knew him, shedding light on an often-overlooked pioneer.

An official catalogue of Fiona Tan's works organized by Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and National Museum of Art, Osaka.Fiona Tan is a visual artist and filmmaker. She is best known for her skillfully crafted video and film installations, in which explorations of memory, time, history, and the role of visual images are key.Boasting fourteen of Tan's works, which span her entire career, this exhibition traces the thematic changes that have occurred over the years in her practice. The world of video expression that she has created is certain to provide viewers with a splendid opportunity to experience cultural memory, accumulated over countless centuries of human history, and various sensations that take shape within individual people.

Fiona Tan has occupied a pivotal position with­in contemporary art since the late 1990s; her moving-image and photographic artworks are familiar from many key international biennials and exhibitions. Fiona Tan explores history and time and our place within them, working within the contested territory of representation. Deeply ­embedded in all of Fiona Tan's work is her ­fas­cination with the mutability of identity, the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space in a world ­increasingly shaped by global culture. Both books mark the occasion of Fiona Tan's first extensive mid-career retrospective, ­presented concurrently at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Kunsthalle Krems. The exhibition cata­logue, ­dis­cusses the works drawn from two decades shown across both ­venues, including the newly com­missioned video works GRAY GLASS and PICKPOCKETS.

"Scenario" is a retrospective of the work of Indonesian visual artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan, whose film "May You Live in Interesting Times" was awarded the prize for best Dutch debut at the Netherlands Film festival. True to its title, the book is constructed as a scenario: a storyboard that evokes its own story but also offers glimpses of as-yet-unrealized projects and dreams, mixing Tan's work with "found" photographs and images. It provides perhaps the most interesting look yet at Tan's concentrated oeuvre of film and video installations, which consider the recycling of history as visual material and problems concerning cultural identity and migration. "Scenario" includes correspondence between Fiona Tan and John Berger, a conversation between Tan and filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, a story written especially for the book by Oscar van den Boogaard, and essays by Lynn Cooke and Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen.

Fiona Tan: GAAF takes as its starting point the Agfacolor advertisement archive -- several thousand 6×6 colour negatives and photographs which were taken between 1952 and 1968.This archive provided Agfa with material for advertisements, brochures, exhibitions, and the magazine Agfa Photoblätter.After discovering this almost forgotten and uncatalogued archive at the Museum Ludwig, the artist Fiona Tan became interested in the inherent paradox of its images: staged and idealized scenes of models posing for professional photographers, nonetheless intended to appear spontaneous and authentic, as if taken by amateurs.The Dutch word 'gaaf' -- an anagram, or reordering, of the letters in Agfa -- means 'neat' or 'perfect.' In this body of work, Fiona Tan focuses on the image and the role of women as portrayed in these photographs, drawing attention to the ideal as opposed to the reality of these formative decades in postwar Germany.Published on occasion of the exhibition, Fiona Tan: GAAF at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (4 May - 11 August 2019).Co-published with Museum Ludwig.English and German text.