Gerardo Tan’s latest solo exhibition at MO_Space, Doing Time: New Work and Some Reconstructions, brings together key works by the artist from the 1980s to the present that address issues of representation, originality, and the authenticity of our experiences. His works reveal the self-reflective nature of art, often by engaging the viewer in a dialogue between what is real and what is being represented.

For Tan, and other artists of the ‘Pictures’ generation that emerged in the 80s, the reproducible image has become the primary mediator of reality. The resulting image-scavenging propped up by the burgeoning media culture against a backdrop of accelerating historical and social changes signaled the inevitable postmodern shift. The shattering of previously held truths unleashed a multiplicity of readings and semiotic possibilities that correspond to Barthes’ statement that “the birth of the reader is at the cost of the author.”

In Doing Time, two works, installed opposite each other, serve as bookends in Tan’s thirty-four years of art practice—“Painting with Content,” a reconstruction of an early work done in 1986 comprised of a gray painting with a compartment containing a photograph of the same painting, and “This is not Mo_,” a new site-specific work composed of a painting of the gallery wall and a video of the same painting projected onto it. Another work, a gray, metal cabinet containing a painted Polaroid of the gallery’s walls and floors, similarly employs acts of reversal and mirror-imaging as a strategy to articulate the complicit nature of painting and its subject, time and space, and the relationship between the ‘original’ and the ‘copy.’

Other reconstructed works in the exhibition utilize the readymade, itself a product of mechanical reproduction, to further question notions of originality, uniqueness, and the consumerist culture that dictates the values we assign to everyday, commonplace objects. Tan quotes Mikhail Epstein: “The ordinariness of things bears witness to their particular importance, their capacity to enter into the order of life, to grow as one with the qualities of human beings to the point that they become a fixed and meaningful part of human existence—all of this is denied to things which are ‘extra-ordinary.’”

Tan’s objects are not removed from their own trappings, but are presented following a symbolic order. In “Code,” an installation he first did in the 90s, he collected objects from various people and meticulously catalogued and documented each one and installed them in a grid manner on the wall. There is no hierarchy among the objects, just equal spaces in between. He also provided an accompanying index to record the details and sources of each object. In the reconstructed version, he uses digital photographs instead as an indexical reference.  

Other works from this period such as “Still Life” and “Sherlock,” which the artist has also reconstructed for this exhibition, likewise highlight the manifold new trajectories and meanings made possible by the confluence of various disparate objects: in this case, a luggage full of remains of bread and lint cradling a glowing neon, and a wheelbarrow with various items purchased from a mall where it was exhibited, including a beach ball bounced afloat by the wind from an electric fan.

“Doing Time,” a more recent work from 2004, from which the exhibition title is also taken, punctuates the exhibition as viewers are asked to register the time they spent viewing the artworks in the gallery using color-coded cards. The data gathered from this exercise will be translated into another work, furthering the cycle of repetition and consummation. Through these works, Tan poses ontological questions—What is a painting? What is an object? What is real, what is not? What is the relation of the viewer to the art object? When does it begin and end?

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