Yu Tan

This project series named Gifts reflects the first stage of self-conscious awakening through the examination of personal interactions between myself and others and is expressed in two parts. Gifts of Love and Mum’s Gift represent my introspection regarding relationships with lovers and between generations. 

About gifts of love: 

I use rose thorns to represent the pain and helplessness in love and how these feelings coexist. The works are titled to give a narrative context to the viewer’s understanding and to create opportunities for others to connect what they see to their own experience and imagination. 

These pieces cannot be worn, demonstrating that these relationships exist only in my memories and that the gifts belong to past events. 

About Mum’s gift: 

When I was a child, I often watched my Mum and Grandmother sewing clothes. When recall these scenes, I feel the time has passed slowly and quietly. In my memories, needlework delivers kindness and love, which have been passed to me as a gift. 

Mum's gift is the summary of Gifts of love, this is used to express life is a line, and different relationships with different people are the segments that I cut off. No matter how the relationship develops, it cannot back to the original state. But they are still precious and meaningful in my life. 

The project “One man band”, is about a love affair. My ideas on this theme are represented by the rose thorns necklace and metal heart.

My intention is that the piece would feature in performance between a woman and man who are wearing the necklace between them and trying to avoid hurting each other when moving forward. Will they lose patience with each other and follow their own feelings and natural pace with time? I drew the analogy between this performance and a romantic relationship where love sometimes coexists with pain, discordance, and compromise.

This hollow metal heart in two halves resembles two people holding each other. Viewed separately, each part exists with a kind of sadness. A device is put inside the heart to record aspects of a couple’s daily life, including talking, eating, walking, and diary writing. When a relationship breaks up, these details still exist. Repeatedly replayed, the verbal exchanges and related emotional and physical conditions of recorded moments are recalled to mind, over and over again, either torturing one or both parties with painful memories generated from the heart. 

In this project, I examine myself, from the past to the present, from the outside to the inside. I try to explore and get in touch with my inner self. These works reflect emotions and feelings that have been suppressed and subsequently recovered. 

These paintings represent my inner world during self-examination. The cube is my physical body and the three people in the painting represent different versions of me. When I start to analyze myself, I will pull one of them out from the cube as an observer, to see how the another two exist in the body, and what their status is. How they struggle in a quiet way.

Following on from my study of relationships with others and with myself, my relationship with the world is the third stage of my self-conscious awakening. 
In this series, the Red Moon, illustrates the relationship with the world. Red, the most festive and positive color in Chinese culture, is used to express passion, strength, happiness, and fortune. For me, as for others, the cross represents negative meanings, such as errors and deletions. It is what people always want to avoid but seems unavoidable. 

The moon is an analogy to the ideal world, inspired by the fictional book "The Moon and Sixpence" by W. Somerset Maugham.

The red moon, like a bright lighthouse in the mist, represents the hardly attainable ideas and desires, which are distant but deeply attract me.