–Arvin Flores

¹ Sugimoto’s project involved the compression of time in the search for the sublime, by implementing a slow photographic exposure of a motion picture in its duration so as to reach the instantaneous aggregation of images, capturing in a flash of light the silver screen, and highlighting the history imbued within the architectural framework. On the other hand, Tan’s reversal of Sugimoto’s iconic imagery flips the discourse on its head with a registration unlike film negative, the density of images exuding from the abyss of the screen in outright negation to technological obsolescence, resistance byway of painting’s slowness, with time as the only determining constant for mutable change.

² The death of painting, similar to the death of art, is another misreading regarding the role of representation, the source of metaphysics or essential truth, and the narrative fostered by official centers, where Tan’s practice of critical formalism in the manner of modernist parlance, itself an ironic radicalism here, destabilizes conventions from within, using painting as conceptual toolkit, and where theoretical counter-measures are blooming along the margins.

³ Tan’s seascapes, in quotation of Sugimoto’s, are droned to the stillness of mechanical reproduction, also referring to the Warholian tactic of questioning authenticity, the disintegration of sources by repetition, the trauma of the real displaced.

⁴ Tan’s use of plexiglass, with the size in proportion to the actual body, which he had also painted half of its surface to further complicate the role of representation, to contaminate the pool of reflexivity, and to doubt the real in the manufacture of narratives—post-truth, not only refers to the phantasm of cinema, but returns once more to painting and its afterlife, zombie-powered, in the gesture of double play, the reading of the image simultaneously prompting the re-writing of its content, the further destruction of the original, the forgetting of authoritarian claims.

⁵ The simulacrum principle diverging from its primary impression that consequently achieves the novelty and authenticity of its means is a theme explored by Jorge Luis Borges in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Arguably, items of appropriation are never quite the true copies they are deemed to be, rather they supersede the original by virtue of time’s distance, the copies more real than their original counterparts in having to survive the challenge of historical awareness. Thus, Tan’s appropriation of Sugimoto’s work displaces Sugimoto’s, where it is not Sugimoto anymore, forget Sugimoto, but Tan emerges new with a diverse distribution of formal disciplines, across media, with a conceptual interrogation about the construction of experience, that of time, and with time, Being.