Till today, Xu Tan keeps his life style as a Chinese flaneur. He has never stop questioning the boundary of art, and the rapid changes of Chinese society creates unique social lab for him to work within. Since 1990′s, Xu Tan has been acting like a thinker than a visual artist. Some of his works were difficult to be defined at that time, but becomes more significant today. “Yishi” probably represents somehow the link between his art and the way he is making it. It is a closer, more accurate way to connect with what conceptual art is in the China context.

Language: Chinese, English
Size: 27.9×14 cm
Page: 20
Year: 2005

About Xu Tan (徐坦)

Born in 1957 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, Xu Tan studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and received a bachelor of fine arts in oil painting in 1983 and a master of fine arts in oil painting in 1989. Currently lives in Shenzhen.

In the early 1990s Xu Tan joined the artist collective “Big Tail Elephant Group” in Guangzhou, the aim of his work is to develop critical strategies for negotiating the rapidly changing economic and cultural life in China. His installation and video works explore issues crucial to the increasingly globalized world like urbanization, the geopolitical relationships between the developed and developing worlds in terms of political, economic, and cultural production and their impacts on personal lives and their expressions. Xu Tan’s works are often site-specific, dealing intimately with everyday experiences to critically demonstrate the tension between globally circulating images, modes of communication, and the impact they have locally. Powerfully and intelligently, Xu Tan’s work calls for contemporary art to engage with social reality in our time. Since 2005, Xu Tan’s Keywords Project has explored linguistic activities, collective research, public space and knowledge production through a variety of working methods in his unique art practice. Searching Keywords, Keywords School and Keywords Lab emerged from this project and reflect Xu’s evolving approach to social investigations, research and aesthetic activities as he studies connections between individual thought and collective consciousness.

Image and Text: The Pavilion, ©Authors, The Pavilion, 2005