PhD · Researcher and practitioner
Associate Professor, Creative Industries, Unitec
Trained psychotherapist
For eighteen years I have worked on the same question in different mediums and materials. What happens between an expression and the people or world it represents, whether the expression is a conversation, an artwork, a platform, a plan, or a model?
The route ran through psychotherapy and psychology, where I trained and taught, then through public art and urban life. I wrote on blogging as self-therapy (Tan, 2008), edited The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm with Cameron Cartiere (2020), served as co-editor-in-chief of Public Art Dialogue, and made participatory work for the Taipei Biennial (2012) and Momentum, the Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art (2017). Advisory work through that period was mostly with cultural and academic institutions across Asia and the Pacific.
Propensities carries the same question into the systems that now do most of the representing. The methods are built to register what those systems have no category for and to feed it back into their redesign.