Category: LOOK/READ
LOOK at galleries and images. I am a visual thinker and make things visible, have visions, envisage better things and problematise, interrogate reality. I make drawings, installation, maps, exhibitions, masterclasses, change. READ words and wordplay, op-eds, blog posts, academic articles, book chapters, theses, hypertext, image as text / text as image, writing about and as art, art about /through writing, scripts for my performance-lectures and provocations, and others ways to take some ownership of words. Currently also articulating a dyslexic mode of creative intervention.

I have been invited to co-teach on a course in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery, for second year art and design students. My creative intervention is entitled ‘Go Back to your own Home! Who owns whose culture? On repatriation, cultural ownership, decolonisation of cultural spaces. Should I stay or should I go? What can visitors, museum workers and artists do (together)?’

My first monograph is under contract with Springer Nature/Palgrave Macmillan, and should be ready circa early 2024. My book will introduce ‘Neurofuturism’ as a heuristic praxis for individuals, collectives and institutions to re-imagine a better future, by re-configuring neurodiversity as a mobile, creative leadership strategy.

Since 2018, I have been a Visiting Lecturer at King’s College London for its Education in Arts and Cultural Settings MA, School of Education, Communication and Society. I lead on 2 sessions: Practice, Movement and Play in Learning, and What will a Neurodiversity-led 2050 look like?, both for the module ‘The Arts, Culture & Education and Learning, Participation’.

This op-ed for The Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE, 16 Nov 2022) outlines an inclusive and heuristic (co-) creative teaching/learning praxis that I term ‘tentacular pedagogy’ (TP), that aims to make creative arts in Higher Education more inclusive and socially-engaged, and for CA-HE to play a more (pro-)active leadership role within HE and beyond in nurturing a more creative and compassionate future, amid the perma- and omni-crises within UK HE and beyond.

Of my involvement in this £1,397,685 NIHR project: ‘Kai visited HMP YOI Isis during the trial to understand the prison environment and what might motivate participants to engage in the trial. Following this, Kai generated images that emphasised choice, control, autonomy, self-care, self-respect, and, at the same time, was mindful of the stigma attached to ADHD.’

Why is normality the gold standard, when the “norm” hasn’t worked for a while? Isn’t it time for new models of leadership, and new role models? Isn’t it more exciting to be non-standard, to be covered in glitter, and to embrace a phenomenal spectrum of colours and possibilities?’ Read my interview on neurodiversity and creativity with Jane Clark at Beshara magazine.

What should art schools change, so that we can lead change and thrive in, with and for the next generation? Since you asked me, I’ll recommend growing tentacles. This is my new keynote for Network for higher arts education with >300,000 members in 282 institutions in Europe, N and S Americas, and AustralAsia.

I have investigated running as an arts and humanities discourse and artistic research paradigm since 2009. I am described as ‘absolutely central’ and ‘instrumental’ (Whelan 2015) in leading and broadening ‘Running Studies’. My work displays ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ (Latham, 2016). A theatre researcher states that ‘it is the artist, curator, and researcher Kai Syng Tan who has done the most in seeking to develop an interdisciplinary discourse around running art and performance (Filmer 2020).

Productive antagonisms is an interdisciplinary mode of knowledge exchange and production (Latham and Tan 2016). Itself an artful juxtaposition of concepts and practices and co-created by an artist and a geographer, I have since extended the concept into a mode of learning and teaching, although it has come from prior framings such as ISLANDHOPPING (2002-2005).

The body and mind in motion and commotion as a form of intervention and interrogation of and amid a world in motion and commotion. A non-linear slideshow performed at ANTI Festival of Contemporary Performance (Kuopio, Finland 2015) and Exparte at the Brick Lane Gallery (for the Singapore Tourism Board, 2015).