"The future is always more boring than the present," Georges Teyssot
"This young generation in China has the greatest opportunities in the world right now," says Laurens Tan, a digital media artist and sculptor based in Beijing. He says it with a certain melancholy, acknowledging that this past century has been a very rough one for the Chinese people, and that these new opportunities have been hard fought and need to be considered with the utmost care.
Tan's appearance and demeanor are deceptively sleek, as is his artwork. Dressed in black, with spiky white hair and Corbusier glasses, he has the look of the classic aesthete. His recent creations - variations on the theme of the three-wheeled vehicle, or Sanlunche, that can be seen on almost any street in China - are for the most part on a toy scale (though a few of his projects are life-size). For Tan, the three-wheeled Sanlunche, whether in the form of a bicycle, motorized rickshaw, or minivan, is emblematic of the clever, scrappy and indigenous solutions to the congested life of Chinese streets, disappearing as quickly as those streets themselves. "The opposite of globalization is nostalgia," he quips.
Laurens Tan was born in 1950, in Holland, to Chinese parents. His childhood was spent travelling, and because he was always so clearly a foreigner, he often felt alienated. "I get sensitive about questions of loss of identity." His family moved from Europe to Indonesia, but became refugees after the ultra-nationalist Sukarno regime began persecuting foreigners in the fifties. They finally settled in Australia, the constant moving stopped until Tan was in his 30's, then he became sort of a global nomad once again.
He came to China only a few years ago, with the unattainable purpose of finding his roots, now two generations behind him. Instead, he happened upon an entire country doing the same thing. Tan feels that "this central body of moving mass," an entire population questioning it's very identity, is the dynamo behind China's current success. The globalization that China is currently embracing is a double-edged sword. "Things that work well are solutions for everybody," he says, but with these fix-all solutions comes the inevitable blanding factor and the loss of indigenous culture. "It's like seeing your older relatives die off." It becomes a matter of what can be preserved, what can be integrated into the new culture.
It seems a counter-intuitive choice, but Tan uses Las Vegas as an example of a city which has lost its character. "Las Vegas is a melting pot of all that is very culturally derivative. It was once a storehouse of Americana." Now every casino is built on a model that can be exported anywhere. It is not the transformation of culture into a more easily accessible form, some might say kitsch, that bothers him. In fact Tan has a collection of souvenirs from around the world: odd little sno-globes and weird doo-dads that play tinny electronic music. For him these are a perfectly legitimate form of nostalgia. It is the spector of the identical object - a comb for example - made in the same factory in China and labeled with the name of each locale it is sold in, that he fears most - "the flattening of culture," he calls it.
Tan's Sanlunche project is now well under way. He has created a series of toy-scale fiberglass rickshaws, replete with steering and rolling wheels, all inscribed with the motto "The Depth of Ease (in Chinese)." This is the slogan Tan has employed to represent the dangers of a culture quickly headed towards total devotion to comfort and entertainment. Tan seems not-unhappily resigned to this eventuality, his fear is that without some sort of aesthetic evolution to go hand-in-hand with globalization, the future will be very repetitive and ugly.
He doesn't shy away from technology in his work - most of Tan's projects are conceptualized and produced using 3D modelling applications. The newest project, again an installation on a toy-sized scale, is a tower of babel based on Breughel's painting - reflecting Tan's issues with learning a new language - Chinese. The project was designed on the computer and is being fabricated at an architectural modeller's in Tianjin. The idea originated when Tan was first in Tianjin, a sprawling industrial metropolis about three hours outside of Beijing. Tan saw a shopkeeper yelling at his dog in Chinese. "That dog knows more Chinese than I do" Tan realized, and this set about a cascade of realizations about the near futility of ever fully learning a language that is not native to you. This led him to another duality (Tan seems to thrive on bridging the space between opposing concepts): that full comprehension of a foreign language is near impossible, but it is in the incomprehensible nuances and subtle linguistic gestures that exist the most sublime human commonalities.
Laurens Tan will be having an exhibition in the Creative Industries Precinct, at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, May 1 through 24, 2008.
Will Corwin is an artist and curator from New York City, currently based in Beijing doing a residency with the Red Gate Gallery. He has curated visual art exhibitions for the AugustArt art festival in New York and the Flushing Town Hall in Queens, a Smithsonian Affiliate. He has shown at the LaMama Gallery in NYC, Gallery Aferro in Newark, and has done site-specific projects with chashama and the Theater for the New City in New York, The Taipei Artists Village, Taipei, and Red Gate Gallery and the Pickled Art Center in Beijing. He is also involved with Smartspace NYC. He currently teaches with the Meet the Met program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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