Fiona Tan was born in 1966 in Pekan Baru, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. She now lives and works in Amsterdam.The daughter of a Chinese father and an Australian mother, she lived in Australia before moving to Europe. Having lived in different cultures as a child, she recognizes within herself a multilayered complexity rooted in that history. Her 1997 film May You Live in Interesting Times depicts the flight of her own family from anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia and highlights her identity as an artist who is herself a symbol for multicultural lives. Tan’s tranquil images reveal the continuing pursuit of difference in works with wide appeal around the world.
In recent years she has turned to the use of fragmentary images, articulating a variety of meanings through techniques of montage and restructuring that convey the ambiguities of memory. While each photograph and video image is shot with a steady hand, their failure to convey the true meaning or facts of what they portray compels viewers to speculate, probing deeply into their own memories, and making the images themselves unforgettable.
In this exhibition, we present works that range from Linnaeus’ Flower Clock (1998) from Tan’s early period to the more recent Rise and Fall (2009) and Seven (2011), in which lines and voices intersecting in discontinuous time are woven together to create one of art’s most compelling stories.

*image (left)
Lapse of memory, 2007
HD installation, 24' 35"
© Fiona Tan, Courtesy of the artist and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo