Jack Tan

My work comes from a mismatch between who I am inside and what I am outside and is informed broadly by colonial experience.

Growing up in a British colony and educated at an English school, I experience myself internally as English. But on the outside I am Chinese or Southeast Asian. My primary experience in the world is that of a fundamental rupture between my form and my content – what I am on the outside and who I imagine myself to be on the inside.

 In Benedict Anderson’s book called ‘Imagined Communities’, he writes:  “… all communities … are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.

For an Asian society like Singapore where children took the old GCE ‘O’ levels, and were taught Chaucer and Wordsworth - but may have never seen a daffodil - this becomes problematic because of the gap between what we imagine ourselves to be and what we are physically, geographically and politically.

So in my work, I have become interested in the relationship between form and content; how the appearance of something can be excavated or studied to reveal the complexity of its content, actual, imagined or otherwise.