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.
As my essay (08.2022) observes, had Running Artfully Network artist Véronique Chance performed her Thames Run in Summer 2022 instead of Summer 2021, she would’ve only needed to run 232km instead of 240km, as the River Thames has since dried up 8km. Well done humans.
UPDATE: I have withdrawn due to non-inclusivity of processes
Pro-Perspirant Provocations premiered in July 2022 at Newcastle Contemporary Art, and was created at the invitation of architect and University of Newcastle Architecture PhD candidate Sarah Ackland to celebrate her new show Taking Space, an effort part of the Matrix Feminist Design Collective.
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.
My new, not very good article ‘The Artful Agile Atypical Octopussy’ is live in the peer-reviewed Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, On (Un)Knowns, 03 March 2022. This was one of 30 selected articles out of 160 proposals, and one of two that are in full colour.
Click here to read my invited commentary, ‘Art and psychiatry in the 21st century: here’s to more messy – and magical – entanglements’ on the British Journal of Psychiatry Bulletin (Cambridge University, open access), in its new the new culture section, Cultural Reflections.
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.
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).
This article was published in Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education April 2021. It outlines three actions for the supervisor, student and examiner, to introduce a level of anti-racist consciousness in the journey of the Fine Art PhD.
Stimulating article by the marvellously-named artist-researcher Gudrun Filipska on the Running Artfully Network launch.
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).
It is Disability History Month and this article was published by Manchester Metropolitan University. As its ‘Disabled Staff Role Model’, I talked about being a neurodivergent academic, and how I spent 12 hours to write 160 words in a form.
We are as racist as any other sector. We have sophisticated ways of covering it up. I don’t want to resuscitate that. It remains the job of a lot of us to keep calling out on bad practices and faux liberalism’.
My human-beast chimera performs a novel, embodied interdisciplinary mode of knowledge exchange and creation.
Power, Play and Pedagogy through the PowerPoint Performance-Lecture (International Journal of Management and Applied Research) Cite as: Tan, K. S. (2020), “Power, Play and Pedagogy through the PowerPoint…
The following was my ‘Lockdown Diary’ entry for the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre upon my final week there as its Visiting Fellow and first Artist in…
I am hyperactive by nature and design. This restlessness is existential, political, neurological, personal, professional.
‘Run Riot’ (2019) is a chapter in Handbook on Methods and Applications for Mobilities Research, Edward Elgar (2020). The structure of the text follows philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s 1778 Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and it activates a dyslexic approach to writing.
Celebrate the Extraordinary (2015) was a practice-led investigation that outlines an inclusive approach to artistic collaboration. It centred on the £4 million opening and closing ceremonies of 8th ASEAN Para Games in 2015, commissioned by the Singapore government.
This paper runs through the RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale’s origins, curatorial framework, and its impact.
As we move from the immediate crisis towards new ones, we need atypical thinkers, agile doers and creative problem-solvers who thrive in unknowns. A call for a more inclusive and creative socio-political ecosystem.
Post on British Medical Journal blog May 2019 which argues for ‘soft and pure’ disciplines must take the lead to enrich our repertoire in how we think about ourselves and others today through a review of book by Dr Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed.
05/2020: Germany and France have enlisted the help of humanities scholars, but we’ll need atypical thinkers and agile makers for artful ways forward.
03/2020: Struggling with social distancing and self-isolation? Here, put on my Catsuit. Meow.
My work has been widely covered by mainstream printed media in UK, Tokyo, Singapore since 1992. Here are a few recent examples.
The Physical and Poetic Processes of Running was a 100,000 word thesis completed at Slade School of Fine Art (2009-2013). I was a University College London scholar. Since its upload in Summer 2014, the thesis has been downloaded 4363 times worldwide.
Article in The Conversation 2018 (10.6m subscribers) which was read 2000 times in the first 2 days. Using #MagicCarpet as an example, it introduced the notion of being ‘ill-disciplined’ (Tan & Asherson 2018).
This was an exhibition of eight works published in the Winter 2016 edition of Transfers Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies.
2020 version of Exceptional Talent, the State of Fun & Islands of After Death, on movement as a human right, which was first performed as a keynote-lecture at Peter Scott at the Inaugural Art & Mobilities Symposium 2018.
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 booklet documents my reflections of #MagicCarpet (2017-2019), and was launched at the public view of my solo exhibition at the Craft and Design Centre
Royal Society of the Arts blog post contextualising RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale 2016, which responded to the (anti-)migrant crisis and referendum results.
This was a commissioned keynote lecture and masterclass for an EU-funded consortium of scientists CoCA at their Annual Meeting, University Hospital Frankfurt, Germany.
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).
Running (In) your City is a book chapter in Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and performance-lecture (ESRC-funded ‘Running Dialogues’, Roxy Bar & Screen in London 2015).
Is there too much, or not enough ‘neurodiversity’ in art & academia in the UK? Premiered at Birkbeck, Arts Week May 2019.
Unreasonable Adjustments outlines the compromises I have to make to fit the neuronormative world. It premiered at Southbank Centre. Tour: 5th International European Network for Hyperkinetic Disorders Conference, Edinburgh and 4th National Conference SOS Dyslexia, San Marino.
Disability Arts Online 2018 article. One of its top 10 editorial pieces, later presented as a performance-lecture at the Science Museum.
Do you take risks? Why? Why not? What’s the greatest risks you have taken? Step forward, tell us. Go on – what’s the worst that can happen?
03/2020: My show at the Craft and Design Centre was shut, but I redistributed some of my fee and have begun to think more about the importance of being ‘crafty’ and ‘artful’.