Here are 4 solo works-in-progress from my (Re-) Searching for Love 2024-2026 project (or: ugly drawings and monstrous mappings for ugly, monstrous times).  Hashtags: #necropolitics #biopolitics #geopolitics

  • Screenshot from work-in-progress essay film: dead bird with blood
  • Drawing of giant service dog with red tongue and small human, all mid-flight
  • Screenshot from work-in-progress essay film: waste land
  • Screenshot from work-in-progress essay film: massive Maine Coon
Neuroqueer Necropolitics: How Regimes Of Power Control And Command How Neurodivergent, Queer And Racialised Subjects Live Or Die (main image at top)
  • Invited journal article for Gothic Studies (special edition, Edinburgh University Press). 
  • APA Citation: Tan, K.S. (c2026) Neuroqueer Necropolitics: How Regimes Of Power Control And Command How Neurodivergent, Queer And Racialised Subjects Live Or Die. Gothic Studies, Gothic Practice (Special Edition). https://euppublishing.com/journal/gothic
  • Abstract (short): Busy landscape with visual motifs of black cats with red tongues, black tentacles with suckers. Near-illegible texts collating/colliding ideas by Mbembe, Puar, Walker and more, on how colonialism, capitalism, racism, ableism, and heteronormativity intersect to govern the lives and (slow) deaths of the multiply-minoritised. 
  • Abstract (longer):
    • Neuroqueer necropolitics: How regimes of power control and command how neurodivergent, queer and racialised subjects live or die has two entangled components: a monstrous mapping, and a short critical text. Collectively, they introduce ‘neuroqueer necropolitics’ as a generative, tentacular, creative mode of inquiry and resistance— diagnostic and propositional, embodied and insurgent, always in motion, and moving towards collective liberation. 
    • As a creative, theoretical framework, neuroqueer necropolitics synthesizes and extends necropolitics queer necropolitics, neuroqueer theory, and decolonial queerness to interrogate how intersecting systems of power—colonialism, capitalism, ableism, and heteronormativity—govern the lives and deaths of neurodivergent, queer, and racialised subjects. As a technology, it identifies and critiques the diagnostic, institutional, affective, and discursive mechanisms that pathologize, criminalize, and render certain bodies disposable. As a metaphor, it seeks to illuminate the entanglements of vitality and disposability, inclusion and abandonment. 
    • Neuroqueer necropolitics encompasses within it neuro-futuristic counter-technologies such as tentacular pedagogy, monster-mapping, and love-led leadership (Tan, 2021–2025) as creative-critical strategies for resistance, re-imagination and collective liberation. In a critical conjuncture where institutions of power openly maims and kills, neuroqueer necropolitics maps together the monstrous, the marginal, and the mis-fit, and directs us to new ways of seeing, feeling, being, and surviving thriving.
  • Reviewers’ feedback: “The image is immediately arresting and the montage and vital hand scribbles give an appropriate aesthetic of urgency. I found the text intriguing – it set the context for this emergent mode of enquiry [of Gothic Practice], weaving together cultural observation and critical backing.”
  • Situating this piece within my body of work – here is a list of references, below.
Deaths, rebirths, rewinds

Tan, K.S., 1993. Where’s Nerv-Ana Now? [comic book].

Tan, K.S., 2007. Living/Working in (Y)Our Theme Park: The Rather Terrible Slaughter of the Tour Guide!

Tan, K.S., 2009a. Monster (a video poem of love [and all its opposites]. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R81spXU2QAc> [Accessed 13 April 2020].

Tan, K.S., 2009b. MUMMY DIES DURING CHILDBIRTH. Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: 12.12.2009 – 09.09.2012. Available at: <http://3rdlifekaidie.com/2009/12/tabula-rasa/> [Accessed 17 July 2010].

Tan, K.S., 2016a. (Dys)service Cat(Suit): ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, conceptual artwork. Available at: <https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kkng8gjs> [Accessed 15 August 2020].

Tan, K.S., 2016b. Hinder: An Unintuitive Dating App. Available at: <https://kaisyngtan.com/artful/hinder/>.

Tan, K.S., 2017a. I Run and Run, Let Out an Earth Shattering Roar, and Turn into a Giant Octopussy. [cotton, wool] Available at: <http://wesatonamat.weebly.com/tapestry-and-installation.html>.

Tan, K.S., 2017b. #MagicCarpet: We Sat on A Mat and Had A Chat and Made Maps! [Tapestry, films, artist-in-residence, participatory art etc] Available at: <https://wesatonamat.weebly.com/>.

Tan, K.S., 2018. What else could ‘neurodiversity’ look like? Disability Arts Online. [online] 19 Feb. Available at: <http://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/else-neurodiversity-look-like/> [Accessed 22 February 2018].

Tan, K.S., 2020. Cat(suit)s and Caring in the Time of COVID-19. Unlimited. Available at: <https://weareunlimited.org.uk/catsuits-and-caring-in-the-time-of-covid-19/> [Accessed 26 March 2020].

Tan, K.S., 2021a. A ‘Tentacular Pedagogy’ to Lead 2050 (Commissioned keynote lecture in the form of a performance-lecture for European League of Institutes of the Arts Teachers Academy, which comprises 300,000+ HE stakeholders from 282 institutions in 48 countries). Available at: <https://kaisyngtan.com/artful/tentacularpedagogy/> [Accessed 7 January 2022].

Tan, K.S., 2021b. How To Thrive In 2050! 8 Tentacular Workouts for a Tantalising Future (Commissioned film for BBC Culture in Quarantine). Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09sgyjy/culture-in-quarantine-how-to-thrive-in-2050> [Accessed 31 December 2021].

Tan, K.S., 2021c. Let’s Imagine A Neuro-Futuristic 2050 together (Commissioned installation, participatory art (speed-dating and wish-making), performance, as part of group show including artist Bob and Roberta Smith, in The World is a Work in Progress, Attenborough Arts Centre. [Film, performance, furniture, plants].

Tan, K.S., 2021d. Towards an anti-racist Fine Art Ph.D.: ‘Anti-racism productive antagonisms’ (ARPA) for the supervisor, student and examiner. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(1), pp.49–63. https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00029_1.

Tan, K.S., 2022. Using Tentacular Pedagogy to change the HE culture. The Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE). Available at: <https://srheblog.com/2022/11/16/using-tentacular-pedagogy-to-change-the-he-culture/> [Accessed 17 November 2022].

Tan, K.S., 2024a. How to curate a love-led symposium? Neurodivergent artist-academics show a way. Council for Higher Education in Art & Design CHEAD. Available at: <https://www.chead.ac.uk/how-to-curate-a-love-led-symposium-neurodivergent-artist-academics-show-a-way/> [Accessed 5 December 2024].

Tan, K.S., 2024b. Looking for Love in 2024. Society for Research into Higher Education. Available at: <https://srheblog.com/2024/02/02/looking-for-love-in-2024/> [Accessed 3 February 2024].

Tan, K.S., 2024c. Love-bombing Higher Education and beyond. Council for Higher Education in Art & Design. Available at: <https://www.chead.ac.uk/love-bombing-higher-education-and-beyond/> [Accessed 16 January 2025].

Tan, K.S., 2024d. M: Monster-Map. Move Mountains, Moons & Mars. In: K.S. Tan, ed. Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation. [online] Springer Nature Switzerland. pp.113–123. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55377-6_14.

Tan, K.S., 2024e. Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation. [online] Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: <https://kaisyngtan.com/artful/book-springer-nature/>.

Tan, K.S., 2024f. Q: Have Quickies with Other Species. In: K.S. Tan, ed. Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation. [online] Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. pp.137–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55377-6_17.

Tan, K.S., 2024g. What’s love got to do with neurodiversity and HE art and design? Society for Research into Higher Education Blog. Available at: <https://srheblog.com/2024/11/29/whats-love-got-to-do-with-neurodiversity-and-he-art-and-design/> [Accessed 30 November 2024].

Tan, K.S., 2025a. Introduction of the term ‘neuroqueer necropolitics’. [online] Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7378709055055269888/> [Accessed 30 September 2025].

Tan, K.S., 2025b. Towards a Love Hub. Available at: <https://kaisyngtan.com/artful/love-led-leadership-practice/>.

Tan, K.S., 2026a. Looking for Love: An Inter(-Sectional Dys-)Course. In: C.-J. Kather, E. Coston, E. McKenney, F. Mangraviti, J. Albers, K. Mead and R. Milne, eds. Spectrums of Sexuality. TBA.

Tan, K.S. and Asherson, P., 2017. Come sit on a mat with an artist and a psychiatrist to have a chat about mind wandering, gingerbread men, shark baits, and the interface of normal/abnormal behaviour. Mind the Gap Blog. Available at: <https://www.academia.edu/34132288/2017_A_practice_led_research_project_weaving_science_and_art_together_to_celebrate_mind_wandering_magic_carpets_mapping_making_making_small_talk_and_productive_antagonisms> [Accessed 22 May 2017].

Tan, K.S. and Asherson, P., 2018. How ‘lofty’ art can help the medical world reimagine mental health. [online] The Conversation. Available at: <http://theconversation.com/how-lofty-art-can-help-the-medical-world-reimagine-mental-health-105689> [Accessed 31 October 2018].

Tan, K.S., Trotman, N. and El Madawi, S., 2027. Towards a Decolonised “Creative Neurodiversity Studies”: Post-normative futures through neurodiasporic subjectivities and (in)formal education’. In: K.S. Tan and R. Dhital, eds. A Handbook of Neurodiversity and Creative Research. Routledge.

Crying Fowl/Foul Crying, Thinking/Stinking of Death, and How the Buck Stops With Me (working titles) (slides 1, 3, 7)
  • Essay film.
  • Slide 1: Dead bird with red interior of mouth and blood, shot in Winchester
  • Slide 3: Waste land and the Mediterranean sea, or Alicante/Gallivante, shot during trip with a French filmmaker
  • Slide 7: close up of giant orange cat at the window, shot in Winchester.
  • Draws on, amongst other matters of life and death, conversations with transgender friends on anti-fatalism and child-freedom as resistance.
Rage/Ghosts/Raw-Dogging (working title) (slide 2) 
  • Invited chapter for ‘Art, Mobilities and Uncertainty’ (Bloomsbury Press). 
  • Drawing of giant service dog with red tongue and small human, all mid-flight, as a homage to/pastiche of 1981 Japanese anime version of 1966 novel Belle et Sebastian, which my 89-year old dad described as a ghost when I showed him the drawing during our video call.
  • In this photograph, the drawing is placed between another large drawing of patterns, and an octopus necklace made by a Winchester School of Art student Lujia Yang according to a brief I had set.
  • APA Citation: Tan, K. S. (2026). (Re-)Searching For Love: A Monster-Mapping ((by invitation; Chapter 3). In K. Barry, P. Merriman, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Art, Mobilities and Uncertainty . Bloomsbury Press.
Details from An inter(-sectional dys-)course (slides 4-6)
  • Invited chapter for ‘Spectrums of Sexuality: Anthology of neurodivergence and sexuality’.
  • Digital drawings of tabby cat washed in blue; mapping with blue cat with red tongue; illegible layered text and tentacles.   
  • APA reference: Tan, K. S. (invited, in progress, c.2026). Looking for love: An inter(-sectional dys-)course. In C.-J. Kather et al. (Eds.), Spectrums of sexuality. Publisher TBA.