Other facets of the same globe
A conversation between Fiona Tan and Saskia Bos
Saskia Bos (SB): Fiona, you told me you stopped making works that could be
characterised as ‘post-colonial’ about three years ago, after having touched on such
issues for ten years or so. Many people still view your work in terms of a search for
identity, of finding cultural roots, and although your recent works are not that far
removed from this, the search for identity seems to have shifted towards an unravelling of
memory.
In A Lapse of Memory, you seem to be in pursuit of what is recollection, as it determines
and influences our fleeting identity. How do you see the connection with earlier works?
Fiona Tan (FT): A Lapse of Memory was born out of a chance encounter with a highly
unusual building – the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. As one of the finest examples of
eastern-style architecture in the West, this building and its interior are a wonderful
homage to fantasy. It was an unexpected feeling – I felt that I just had to do something
with that place. My own hybrid background straddling East and West and my personal
questions relating to ‘Chineseness’ were for me personally linked to that building. It was
over ten years since I had made May You Live in Interesting Times and I felt I had left ‘all
that’ – meaning my post-colonial roots/routes – behind me. But here, all of a sudden, was
this building, which refused to go away. It felt like full circle, like a way of completing a
sentence. Ten years later, I felt that a conclusive explanation was required of me. And I
felt a need for closure. For once and for all, or so I liked to pretend, I would deal with
these matters and then put them behind me.
It was only after I completed the piece that I could see that in some ways the character I
created to inhabit this empty building was not only a certain personification of the
building itself, but also had links with me personally.
Identity and memory are undeniably linked. That is the great tragedy for patients with
Alzheimer’s disease or senile dementia. By losing their memory, they lose themselves
and their family, and loved ones lose them too.