Category: COLLABORATE
WORK WITH ME. Let’s make change together. Get in touch to work with me or support my endeavours as a partnering institution, creative collaborator, writer, project manager and more. Email me at kai [at] kaisyngtan.com or DM me at Twitter @kaisyngtan.
Tentacles Making Fists: Re-Imagining and Neuro-Futurising Leadership, with Dr Kai Syng Tan is a review of my book ‘Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership’ by Dr Adam McDade for Council for Higher Education in Art & Design CHEAD website. is an illustrator, designer, tattooist, and independent scholar from Sunderland, based in Manchester, UK. He holds a PhD in Design (2021) and produced the first ever piece of academic research to utilise tattooing practice as a research methodology. CHEAD is the UK representative body for 70 Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in art, design, creative media, and related disciplines.
YOU ARE INVITED to an animated evening that shares insights into the making of the book Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation by artist-agitator-advisor Kai Syng Tan at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, UK. Drawing on the big-picture thinking and risk-taking approach of neuro-divergence, the book introduces ‘neuro-futurism’ as a toolkit, to re-claim ways to think about and do ‘leadership’ as a diversified, beyond-colonial, neuro-queered and (co-)creative change- and future-making practice.
Love and leadership meets ethics meet counter-mapping meets finding /forming new alliances meets a re-imagination of my new home. FAB PALS is a new project I am leading, commissioned by Social Practice Lab by invitation, and funded by the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
The following is a version of what I first published on Valentines Day on Instagram. It is a further example from my call for those in Higher Education and beyond to centre love in what / how we do, as shared in my recent op-eds.
In this op-ed published for the Valentine’s season on the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) blog, I am looking for and locating concepts and actions around a four-letter word – love.
What could our future look like? Even — or especially — when the absurdity and extra-ordinariness of how things are makes this a preposterous question to raise, let alone respond to, it is imperative that we insist, persist, and resist, by making, re-making, re-imagining and re-inventing our truths, to re-write our own stories, histories and futures, to work through our pain, trauma and joys. Come ‘Have a Speed-Date With Kai – Let’s Re-Imagine our (Collective) Future Together’, at a group show Ordinary Things (02-25 November 2023), The Winchester Gallery, curated by Professor of Visual Politics Louise Siddons.
I enjoy playing with words and the written language as creative material. However, certain ‘standard’ approaches can present difficulty. Being dyslexic, academic writing and reading aren’t my mother tongue. I am thus delighted to have signed not one but three book contracts recently. The books are distinct in their tone, case studies and reach, but also, interrelated. They will reach the world from 2024.
I’ve migrated back down south — quiet south. I’m thrilled to share that since July 2023, I’ve become Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership at University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art.
Gallery of commissioners, clients, groups, media & organisations in & beyond research, HE, creative & cultural sectors, governmental departments & more that I’ve worked with, in Iceland, Ireland, Tokyo, NY, London, Dumaguete, Singapore & more.
Since 2018 I have been an invited Visiting Lecturer to teach on two MSc programmes: St Georges University London & Birkbeck: Global Health Humanities MSc, and King’s College London (KCL): Affective Disorder MSc.
In this course, we will look at clips from my commissioned film about a ‘neuro-futuristic’ 2050, How to Thrive in 2050, then break into groups and share thoughts and action for our immediate and longer term future. We will cover tactics to push back the pushback, such as forms of censorship and control. Premiere: 3 May 2022, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester UK.
I will be delivering a workshop with Dr Mohammed Rashed entitled ‘From Conditions to Encounters: The Problem of Understanding in Philosophy of Psychiatry’ at Mind, Value and Mental Health: Philosophy and Psychiatry Summer School 2022, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford.
You can buy everything you can see on this website, and more. This includes: drawings, art objects like the tapestry above myself, and my thinking time. As I over-think, this will not come cheap. You have been warned.
What can ‘Neurodivergent Leadership’ look like? A 15-month creative practice-led research project. Get in touch now to support/collaborate!
What would a neurodiversity-led reality look like? My installation and performance at the Attenborough Arts Centre in the exhibition The World is A Work In Progress (curated by Rachel Graves, 25 September 2021 – 16 January 2022) in Leicester, UK proposes that art and neuro-inclusion are key in creating bold visions of how things can be better, and that each of us can play an active part in that process.
Summary some of my ongoing efforts in anti-racism and Black Lives Matter in collaboration with the outstanding Professor Ola Uduku (University of Liverpool Head of Architecture) in Manchester and the Northwest region and beyond.
Out now: Compliance, Model Minority and Docility: A set of three new fragrances. Apply amply. If you think you have applied enough, bend over backwards to do even more.
This is an op-ed published in Frontiers in Psychology. It is led by Laura Gallo (formerly King’s College London neuroscience MSc student), in collaboration with myself, Dr Vincent Giampietro and Dr Patricia Zunszain (King’s College London).
I’m delighted to join the British Journal of Psychiatry Editorial board. ‘ve been asked to help shape content, especially with the new culture section, and to help commission and identify reviewers and contributors. Contact me if you are keen to get involved!
I welcome new PhD and post-doctoral researchers, and/or PhD external examination opportunities, across diverse subject areas within and beyond the creative arts and humanities
Want to work with me? Here’s how.
Can running-inspired art and art-inspired running catalyse artful ways forward for a more equitable post-pandemic future?
Instead of OBE/MBE/CBE, we’ll have NDE (NeuroDiversity medal of Excellence). Universities will finally stop failing or boring people, offering interdisciplinary MASc and PhDs. ‘Neurodiversity’ will also become truly diversified. We’ll then run around with tentacles on our heads. New performance-lecture at Royal Society of Arts attended by 130 people.
Extensive fieldwork proved that most dating apps suck. Thus, this is ‘Hinder’, my unintuitive dating app.
05/2020: Get in touch to help me learn and do better as a woman, teacher, artist, and human being.
Speed dates are the perfect format for the short-attention spanned, novelty-chasing, risk-desiring, boredom-adverse, intellectually-promiscuous ADHD person. Thus, I curated this speed-dating event at the South London Gallery in June 2018.
This is a new performance-lecture created in June 2020. It will premiere on 7 July 2020 at Manchester School of Art. It was developed from a talk I gave at Live Art Developmental Agency Summer 2019, by invitation by ‘allies’.
Amid times of distress. we must give birth to hope. Let’s build new visions together and live happily ever after. Speed-date me. You will ask for more.
1) WE MUST STEP UP OUR GAME 2) LET’S BECOME CRITICAL FRIENDS 3) LET’S CREATE PRODUCTIVE ANTAGONISMS 4) LET’S PLAY 5) LET’S BE ILL-DISCIPLINED 6) LET’S STEP OUT OF SILOS & EMBRACE A 360-DEGREE VANTAGE POINT 7) LET’S STEP OUT OF COMFORT ZONES 8) LET’S STEP INTO UNKNOWN TOGETHER 9) LET’S EMBRACE ERRORS 10) WE’RE STRONGER TOGETHER
Desperate times call for desperate, artful measures. Our relationship with time gets distorted when we are desperate. A key response to the pandemic has been the coining of…
04/2020: Other efforts during the pandemic in local and professional contexts and beyond.
04/2020: As UKAAN Creative and Cultural Consultant, I put together a few creative resources for mental health professionals and service users.
03/2020: Keen to explore the messy and magical entanglements between neurodiversity, creativity and research, and all the possibilities and intersections in between? Join the Neurodiversity In/And Creative Research Network, a new international hub.
JOIN NOW! I co-founded and manage the Running Cultures Research Group in 2014 which has been key in helping to widening and advancing the emerging ‘Running Studies as an arts and humanities discourse.