Biography

 

Curriculum vitae, PDF (61 KB)

 

Born in 1973 in Syracuse, NY, USA, Lisa Tan lives in Stockholm where she is Professor of Fine Art at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. She works with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures. Her own experiences of desire, loss and otherness, serve as drivers for explorations into consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and the role that different representations play in shaping a person’s relationship to the world and to others. She regularly draws from literature, literary theory and the history of photography.

 

 

In a series of video works, Sunsets (2012), Notes From Underground (2013), and Waves (2014-15), Tan draws from the enigmatic writers Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, and Virginia Woolf. Female consciousness becomes a guide to the various worlds figured within each work. The videos illuminate creative life and ponder how to exist with others given the sharply angled urgencies of our time. For instance, in Waves, Tan plays off of Woolf’s experimental novel, The Waves, filming and writing as a way to grasp distances and to try to make some sense of material reality in the digital age. In another more recent work titled My Pictures of You (2017-19), Tan thinks about images of Mars together with Roland Barthes’ writing on photography as vehicles to solve a riddle about death and the future. The act becomes an unlikely, joyful affirmation of earthbound existence.

 

Lisa Tan is represented by Galleri Riis (Oslo). Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim (2017), and the group exhibitions, osloBIENNALEN First Edition (2019-2020), An Inventory of Shimmers, MIT List Center (2017), Show and Tell, Malmö Konstmuseum (2017), Why Not Ask Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), Decent, ICA Philadelphia (2016), Surround Audience, Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015). Her work is included in the public collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum, the City of Oslo’s public art collection, and Coleção Moraes-Barbosa, São Paulo.

 

Lisa Tan’s artist book Sunsets, Notes From Underground, and Waves, is published by and available at Archive Books, Berlin.

 

 

For full-length viewing copies of Lisa Tan's videos please email the studio address below.

 

 

 

 

Contact information

 

Instagram

 

 

Lisa Tan Studio

Gröndalsvägen 22

117 66 Stockholm, Sweden

+46 70 883 57 95

info (at) lisatan.net

www.lisatan.net

 

 

Galleri Riis

Arbins gate 7

0253 Oslo, Norway

+47 22 94 40 40

info (at) galleririis.no

 

www.galleririis.com

 

 

Filmform

Svarvargatan 2

112 49 Stockholm, Sweden

distributor for a selection of videos by Lisa Tan

 

www.filmform.se

 

 

 

News

 

Forthcoming artist talk at ABK Stuttgart, State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, and Otis School of Art and Design, Los Angeles, January-February 2021

 

Lisa Tan selected for residency at Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture in San Sebastian, October-December, 2020

 

Notes From Underground (2013) will be exhibited as part of the collection of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, October 2020

 

Ballroom Marfa screens My Pictures of You, followed by Q & A with curator, Daisy Nam and Lisa Tan, August 29, 2020

 

My Pictures of You is a part of Artists' Film International 2020, online at Whitechapel Gallery, with an interview

 

Review in Kunstkritikk of solo exhibition at Galleri Riis, Oslo, October 17-November 10, 2019 (PDF 394 KB)