Sylvia Tan

About

Xinran Tan, Sylvia is a curator based in London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Her curatorial concerns center on space, border, and diaspora, exploring in these contexts cross-cultural experience, visibility of antagonism, and the power dynamics between individuality and structurality.

Shaped by her personal experiences of migration and social movements, her curatorial thinking shifts around two key aspects and their intersectionality – the state of in-betweenness experienced among migration and transculturality, in relation to the imposed bureaucratical governance, surveillance, and violence. She interprets their entanglement underneath an overarching agenda – the power relations between individual experience of insecurity, uncertainty, and the structured rigidity choreographed and regulated by bodies of power.

Tan’s practice is concerned with how diasporic and activist themes are articulated in contemporary art, not only as a reaction to the technology of state control but also regarding the similar disciplining nature inherent to curating itself. She realizes their antagonist nature as an expressive activity essentially contradictory to the authoritarian orders of curating, and sees such a parallel between the subjects of curating and its modalities – a shared paradox of “institutionalized politics”. Drawing upon Édouard Glissant’s thinking about opacity and transparency, Tan accentuates a discernment of the power dynamics, reflecting on how politics of display, by managing visibility, influence the constitution of subjectivity. She thus seeks to explore how lines of flight may arise, navigate, and create counter-expositions that disrupt the representation and incorporation of institutional structure in curatorial praxis.

Prior to her studies at the Royal College of Art, Tan received her BA in Cultural Management from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has had curatorial engagements with several institutions in Shanghai and Hong Kong, including UCCA Edge, Para Site, and Power Station of Art.