You have to lose your way,

                  to find your self in the right place. 

                                                     NUS Museum - Singapore


​2019

    As I write this page in August 2019, it feels like the exhibition You have to lose your way to find your self in the right place has already become a decisive moment of my artistic journey in life. Presented by the National University of Singapore Museum, this is my first solo show in a Singaporean institution. In fact it is my first museum solo show ever. Certainly something anyone can be happy about in terms of recognition. But the most important aspect of this public presentation is the promise of a long-term impact onto the future growth of my work itself. What started as a proposal about my research on Jules Itier became a thoughtfully curated show on my work proper. It consists of a wide range of works done in different medium, a selection reflecting on the body of work produced in the course of my forty-over years of artistic practice and gathered thematically around my relation to Asia. It materialises the intuitive, almost naive, dialogue held while living in this part of the world, and traces the way it developed, fuelled by the free-spirited experiences gathered along the roads while making a living as an independant travel photographer-writer in Asia. 

    The title is a line taken from the video Meeting in Macao, one of the five video works created specifically for this show. The production of these five videos in the first half of 2019 required me to seriously explore video editing, finally! I had ran away from it for too long in fact. I did so through a stimulating trial and error creative process, and enjoyed it so much that the medium eventually became an integral part of my artistic palette. Besides these videos, three of which follow a MTV format, the re-enactment of Itier's panorama of Canton is the only other new piece of work presented. This was a continuation of the experimental darkroom technique used for the previous solo show, The Probability of Veracity - part 2. With it, the work on Itier is still present, but in a much less prominent manner than initially planed. It mostly became a point of comparison between two visions of Asia shared by two French men, both originating from Provence, both using photography and writing, but each standing at the two ends of the controversial period of European colonialism in Asia, as well as the two ends of photography technical history. The contrast between these two visions helps to contextualise the progression of my explorations by looking at my own past from  a wider perspective. Indeed, all the other works selected were already existing ones. They even include the 1977 Time Frame piece, the seminal piece brought with me from France in 1981. In the end, the unexpected beauty of this show is that it helped me to resolve the long standing question of where is "home", a haunting dilemma ever since I left France to work in Singapore. The selection also achieved a synthesis of my research on the theory of photography by paralleling the 1970s experiments and those from the 2010s. Yet, this time-frame of five decades  (my entire adult life!) did not quite intend to be a retrospective as such, at least not yet! Rather it hoped to become the platform for an in-depth analysis of my riotous approach to art making, rooted as it is in the free-flowing bodily expression of my childhood spontaneity, so wild and multifarious that no curator could frame it adequately so far. I am deeply grateful to the curatorial team of the NUS Museum to have done just that.

Out of our conversations and guided by a focus on meaning, their artistic investigation resulted in the long awaited articulated overview of my work and most importantly the process behind it. They made the artistic vision accessible to an anonymous public, its form, scope and content understandable independently of the artist's physical presence, a defining moment of growth in any artistic journey. This step taken in Singapore will hopefully lead to horizons that had remained beyond my reach until now. Who knows... in the end I might even find myself in a new "right" place, so new that I have no idea it exists! Where can it be...? I guess it can only be very beautiful!

Exhibition Invitation and catalogue 

The Show

Exhibited artworks 

displayed in chronological order of creation​


​1977
Time Frame - photograph, ink and watercolour on paper

1983-86
Parade - published colour slides

1984-88
from the Singapore from BW to C series - tinted silver prints

1989-90
Calcutta sketches from The Imaginary Facades of Calcutta - water colour

1991
Stop, Look, Walk from Singapore boy time flies with you - laser copies and teak wood

1986-92
Coffee Shop - mixed media on site installation

1991-92
Shanker Hotel - photo object 

1992
 When did we last meet? - performance text

1993
From Saigon to Hanoi in 9 days - travel story

2004
From Retro Specks Future Pix - photo objects installation (collection Kelvin Hang)

2014-15
From the research Searching for Jules - digital photo documentation

2014-19
 Jules Itier, the re-enactements: the panorama of Canton, from the research Searching for Jules
eight analogue prints from pinhole shots on film printed on fibre base Ilford silver paper exposed using a digital projector

1960 -2019
 A song from home
​ 10.30mn single chanel video - super 8mm film by Yves Massot, videography by Brian Gothong Tan, musical direction by Ruben Pang

1989 -2019
Meeting in Macao
24.32mn single channel video - based on a travel story published in 1991, narrator Julius Foo, original musical score by Chong Li Chuan

2014-19 
There are always two shores to an ocean
12.02 mn single channel video - shot in Galle, Sri Lanka and Pondicherry, India

2015-19 
Pink moon over Whampoa
13.41mn single channel video - videography by Brian Gothong Tan (Singapore) and Gilles Massot (Paris)

2018-19
Time Frame v.2.0.19
22.32mn single channel video - videography by Brian Gothong Tan, musical performance by Siong Leng Musical Association
I AM MA.
As simple as that.
And I work on the space between things.
© 2017