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Kai Syng Tan
Profile/CV
KAI SYNG TAN (Artist, art curator, art educator) Since being named ‘The Most Promising Young Artist’ at the UOB Painting of the Year Competition at the age of 18, Kai Syng TAN has been out and about in the art world – hopefully still with some degree of ‘promise’.
Kai Syng is a die-hard Made-In-Singapore Artist who is an insatiable tourist- consumer-hoarder who scavenges the surrounding clutter of signs/noise; as a compulsive editor she chews up, re-arranges and re-maps the found fragments into densely-layered works that question our ‘realities’ of the here and now, via the image (she was trained as a painter and sculptor)-music (she underwent classical piano education for 11 years) and text (for all her grandiouse philosophical and semiotic inquiries) in time and space, about, and for our here and now.
Having lived in the ‘Wild West’ and ‘Far East’ makes Kai Syng and her works a delicious concoction. Be it multimedia installation, single-channel video art, short films, text, ‘live’ cinema or performance, Kai Syng’s work are fiercely personal but always at a critical distant, with an urgency laced with self-reflexivity, inviting multiple levels of reading.
Her works have been shown in more than 40 cities (Guangzhou Triennale 2008, Asia Art Biennale 2008, Biennale of Sydney 2006; ICA London 2005; House of World Cultures 2005, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2001, British Short Film Festival 1996, Transmediale 2000).
Kai Syng won several grants and awards along the way (San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gates Award New Visions Video 1998; NIFCA Artist-In-Residency Award Helsinki, Finland 2006, Japan Foundation Artist-In-Residency Award Beppu Mixed Bathing World Contemporary Arts Festival 2009; The Young Artist Award 2007; project and travelling grants from the National Arts Council).
In 2008, Kai Syng was video artist and performer in Generations (directed by Ivan Heng), which premiered in Moscow’s Dom Musiki. She also participated in the Cinema South Festival in Sderot, 2km from the Gaza Strip in Israel, as curator of South East Asian programme.
In 2010, she will premiere her permanent public commission, a video installation, at the new subway Bras Basah Station of the Circle Line in Singapore. She will also curate a film programme at the Jaipur International Film Festival 2010. Her works are collected by Fukuoka Asia Museum of Art, streamed in a UK media channel Firecracker Media, and being sold by Artinno Galleria.
Kai Syng sees her roles as an educator, curator and writer as extensions of her creative practice. She was educated at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (BA in Fine Art, 1st class honours), School of Art Institute of Chicago USA as well as the Musashino Art University (Masters of Arts Distinction, Excellence Award), on full scholarships (Shell-NAC Arts Scholarship 1994; JCCI Arts Scholarship 2005).
She taught Film Theory, 16mm Filmmaking and Film History for 3 years as lecturer in a polytechnic, and for nearly 4 years, she was Pathway Leader of Video Art at the Faculty of Media Arts, at an art college in Singapore. She was also Digital Arts consultant and Adjunct Lecturer at the School of the Arts, and since 2007 she has been an Advisory Committee member for the Interactive and Digital Media Industry, Media Development Authority of Singapore.
From Fall 2009 Kai Syng returned to the Slade School to undertake her PhD degree in Fine Art, on the Overseas Research Scholarship and Graduate Research Scholarship from the University College London, as well as a grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore. Her written and practical research examines the collision and collusion of our off- and on-line realities in the internet-mediated era of today, under the supervisions of Dr Susan Collins, Dr Sharon Morris and Mr Jon Thomson.
For 1000-days she will live Life 3.0 as ‘Kaidie’ (performed by Kai Syng), who attempts to look for the Meaning of Life 3.0 in the city of ‘Nondon’ (performed by London) with the help of the audience at <3rdlifekaidie.com>. Kaidie will conduct her first Life 1.0, real-life appearance in Zurich, Switzerland in January 2010, on the Villa Straeuli Artist-In-Residency programme.
On a day-to day basis, Kai Syng enjoys her endurance swims and runs, being rather accomplished at enduring herself (it has been all these years after all). Having completed her first half-marathon (SAFRA Bay Run, August 2009 Singapore), she looks forward to running/limping/crawling her first marathon while waxing lyrical about the age-old mind-body problem. Otherwise, she still harbour of fantasies riding the Trans-Siberian, and about being a (mature) concert pianist some day in some life, since music – along with Math and Mark Rothko – can be more distant from this daily grind of ‘contemporary art’ (hence the Eisenstein lament of the advent of sound in cinema – what would he say about the arts today!?!).
She also enjoys random friendship with stray cats.
Website 3rdlifekaidie.com
