V

THE CHANGELING THE OTHER FACE T0 FACEiviici-iAELNEwMAN

Every portrait can be conceived as a se/f-portrait of the artist

and of the viewer, as well as a portrait of the ostensible subject

whose always present image substitutes for the mirror-image.

And every self-portrait could equally be conceived as a por-

trait ofthe other, of the I as another, to paraphrase Rimbaud!In addition, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida points outin Memoirs of the Blind, in looking at a self-portrait that has

been painted or drawn using a mirror, the viewer takes the

place of the mirror, substituting his or her eyes for the eyes

of the artist, who is thus retroactively blinded?

In Fiona Tan's installation, The Change/ing (2006). a single

image of a Japanese schoolgirl is placed opposite a screenon which over 200 images of different girls from the samepre-World War ll high school yearbook are shown in sequence.

All the girls were looking directly into the camera when the

photographs were taken, so we have the impression that they

are looking back at us, but from long ago, their frozen past-

present interrupting our current time. The image sequencelimits how long we can examine each of the many faces before

it passes away. The single image feels more like somethingheld and preserved, overcoming time yet imbued with the very

sense of loss for which this preservation partly compensates.Placing the one face to face with the many sets up a play

of sameness and difference. If we look at how this works

across two axes the distinction between difference and other-

ness becomes evident. The first involves the relationship of

the images to each other and the second depends on the way

the viewer projects presuppositions onto the image. In this

first way, independently of the viewer, the photographs of the

girls, like the girls themselves, are both similar to and differ-

ent from each other. Theyare members of a generation, a race

and, judging by the uniform, an institution, but at the sametime each face, with its unique qualities and physiognomy,

stands out amongst all the others.

But the relational differences between each of the mem-

bers of this archive of images is not the same as the relational

difference experienced by the viewer who stands outside and

looks, nor the projected possibility of being seen that existed

for the subject when photographed. The axis of sameness and

difference is intersected by that of self and other. The photo-

graph becomes a mirror image-all the more so through its

extension in durational time as video-while the subject of the

THE CHANGELING, zoo6 (INSTALLATION vnzw)

NEWMAN

photograph becomes the other of the viewer: the viewer con-

fronts his or her other as image, and an image with a duration

like a mirror image. The question then arises: what is the

relation of this kind of otherness to difference? Put bluntly, is

the other person other because they are different, where this

difference is a matter of identity that is perceivable through

physical qualities and other markers such as racial identity.

gender, membership of a group indicated by clothing, and

so on? But how can these qualities relate to otherness in the

sense of singularity when they are shared with others? The

uniqueness of the other as other cannot be a matter of qualities

and identifications, or even concatenations of them. The sin-

gularity ofthe other is beyond, even transcends, these things?

The fascination of a portrait photograph is that the subject

of the photograph overflows the contingency and indifference

of its qualities. The photograph records whatever is physically

there in front of the camera. ln the case of these girls. the for-

mat is a standard head and shoulders. The uniformity draws

attention to the way the institution represses difference and

to the conformity of the photographic archive with processes

of social control. Yet, perhaps because we know that it was a

living person in her singularity who composed herself and posed

in front of the camera, the image seems to exceed its limits

(and is in this respect like an icon). All the girls are facing

forward, but what, exactly are they facing? The camera? The

future viewer? Themselves reflected in the lens? We are con-

fronted simultaneously with the image of a Japanese school-

girl of the 1930s-the photograph as the “that-has-been"“ of

the moment in which it was taken-but also with an other who

seems to regard us. This other looks at the viewer in the pres-

ent of an encounter rather than the past of an image, and con-

cerns that viewer in the French sense of regarder as both look

and concern (ga me regarde, literally "it looks at me," means "it

concerns me," in the sense that the image addresses me

uniquely and calls for me to respond).

While the photograph as a registration of light records a

past moment, the experience of being looked at by the sub-

ject of the photograph takes place in the present ofthe viewer,

and the concern to which it gives rise projects a future of

response. All these temporal moments enter into the voice-

over that accompanies the images. The photograph represents

both a memory of the past and an anticipation of the future.

The woman's voice, together with the digital presentation of

the image on a monitor, places it in a temporal flow, which

mitigates the status of an archival relic it would otherwise

assume: the image is in the time that carries the viewer on

towards a future that will inevitably involve aging and death.

um cuANr;m,1Nr:, zoo6 (sT1i,i.s)

even if the photograph itself will not change. The voice speaks

from positions that offer the viewer identifications with gen-

erations of women-grandmother, mother, daughter-amongwho, in more than one place, is the artist. ln addition, each

of the voices of the actors employed to speak in installations

of the work in different linguistic communities has its own

“grain" which gives the words a particular texture and speci-

ficity, their "body_"5

Photographs often, and almost inevitably, become un-

moored from the proper names of their subjects. Most of us

will have had the experience of looking at family photographs

in albums where names can no longer be put to faces. The

proper name is the linguistic sign for singularity, even if the

subject is only rarely the bearer of her proper name (or, in the

case of a photographic subject, rarely labelled). Without her

name, the girl becomes a subject for identification through a

personal pronoun: an I, a you or a she.6 These are positions

with which absolutely anyone may identify, whether or not race.

gender, or community are shared with the subject of the pho-

tograph; they are entirely abstract and universal, and may be

occupied by anyone who knows the language. ln the published

version of the voice-over, attributions of the words to “She"

and "I" frame those to "Grandmother" and "Mother" The spec-

ification is provided by a narrative fiction into which the viewer

may slide, in this case the implied story of the relationships

between grandmother, mother and daughter. In the circum-

stances of diaspora (Tan was born in Indonesia of a Chinese

father and an Australian-Scottish mother, brought up in Aus-

tralia and lives in the Netherlands) family becomes an impor-

tant source of identity. Family is also a particularly important

value in Chinese culture, and in her essay film for television,

May You Live in Interesting Times (1997), Tan went in search of

her Chinese roots. She interviewed the members of her family

now scattered around the world, ending up in the village in China

from which the Tan family originated. “I started this journey in

search of mirrors," she says, but realizes that she will never

feel entirely part of her family, nor can she be at home in this

village: “My self-definition seems an impossibility, an identity

defined only by what it is not."

Tan named an exhibition of her work in which The Changeling

was shown, Mirror Maker, implyingthat what she is doing in her

work is making devices or mises-en-scene that produce re-

flections, in the metaphoric as well as literal sense? She took

the title from a story by Primo Levi, in which the mirror maker

fabricates not only flat and distorting mirrors, but also invents

a mirror that, when stuck to the forehead of someone else,

will reflect back to you how they see you.” ln Levi's story this

THE CHANGELING

invention was not a great success, as people did not want to

be disabused of their illusions by seeing how others saw them.

This reveals something of the truth of the portrait-and the

self-portrait-that the self anticipates how it will be seen by

others. The later Provenance (2008)-six films of people in

some way connected to Tan, shown in their familiar environ-

ments and presented on monitors hanging on the wall-was

explicitly a response to Dutch seventeenth century portrait

painting? The black and white moving images (the subjects

are seen both in fixed shots and in slow tracking shots) have

in principle less physical presence than oil paintings, but

greater temporal presence.

The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the painted

portrait projects itself ahead of itself, like the wake before

the prow ofa ship.1° This also implies a protean quality to the

portrait, which involves less a fixing of the subject in repre-

sentation than it does an exposure of the subject to the world.

ln mythology and folk tale a Changeling is the offspring of a

fairy or troll who is substituted for a human child: this implies

two things, that someone like us, the same, has been replaced

by an alien other, and that this has occurred through an event

or process of substitution. The act of making a photograph is a

fixing of the subject, both in the registration that takes place

when the button of the camera is pressed, and again when a

print is made. Yet through the temporalization of the still

photographic image, by using a video camera to record an

archival photograph, Tan transforms an object into a process.

ln a number of works Tan places the still and moving image in an

interdependent relationship. ln Countenance (2002) Tan made

video images of people standing still, Berliners who were clas-

sified in the same way as those in August Sander's Menschen

des 20. Jahrhunderts. (She did this as much to show the

impossibility of that project as to follow it.) ln Correction (2004)

Tan used the same procedure with prisoners and guards from

four US prisons. In The Changeling, by giving duration to the

photograph through video, Tan unfixes the photograph's fixity

without abolishing it. Although we know that we are looking at

a photograph, what we are seeing has its own time span.

which is reinforced by the duration of the accompanying

voice-over. In a sense, Tan allows the subjects of the portraits

some space and time to present themselves. In The Changeling

it is as if Tan is restoring this capacity to people who have been

frozen in the image.

The fixing itself becomes a moment in a narrative duration.

but this moment is given more meaning by the voice-over

which cites Daphne and Niobe, two female figures from Ovid's

Metamorphoses, whose stories are described as ‘... bearing

THE CHANGELING, 2006 (INSTALLATION visw)

NEWMAN

the weight of too much sadness." Daphne, who is fleeing the

desire of Apollo, is turned into a Laurel tree by her father, the

river Peneus. Niobe, whose children are killed because of her

prideful offence to the goddess Latona. turns to stone in grief.

Thus, the freezing of the woman's self in the photograph, jux-

taposed to Ovid's stories, comes to seem no mere mechanical

act but a response to the threat of rape and overwhelming

pain. However, this consideration ofthe photograph as a meta-

morphosis requires that we see it within a process of change

and generation over time.

As with some of her other pieces, Tan`s making of The

Changeling is an act of appropriation, in this case of images

which, in the album or place where she found them, had a con-

text. The persons inthe original photographs would have been

named and so would the school and community to which they

belonged. Although still generally identifiable as coming from

a particular generation, time period and country, even per-

haps ofa social class, in Tan's installation the subjects of the

photographs are disconnected from their original, very par-

ticular, context.” The unease of the viewer at this appropri-

ation is part of the experience of the work, as it was with

Tan's earlier borrowings from the anthropological archive; the

1999 works Facing Forward and Tuareg, for example. ln those

works the colonizing photograph is disrupted by a confron-

tation with or experience of the other in the present time of

viewing, and despite geographical and temporal remoteness,

a spark of unmediated connection is created between viewer

and viewed.

If The Changeling takes over an archive of portraits of oth-

ers, the voice-over offers the possibility that these images

might constitute a kind of self-portrait. What does the artist

do when she makes a self-portrait? She looks at herself in the

mirror, but what is she looking for? Her self? What, then, is

the relation of self to appearance? And what if, in place ofthe

mirror, a photograph appears? ln answer to the question.

“Who am l?" another appears in her place. What does the sub-

ject do when a portrait photograph is taken of her. whether by

herself, or another? She composes herself, presents herself

as she wants to appear, projects herself towards those who

will see her picture in the future, envisaging herself in their

eyes. So when, at the end, the voice-over says, “A self-portrait

in search, yet again, of self," this could refer both to the artist.

Fiona Tan. searching for herself in the pictures of the Japan-

ese girls, of whom we know nothing, and also to those girls.

composing themselves for the portraits which will be pre-

sented to us, their unknown future viewers.

THE CHANGELING, zoo6 (INSTALLATION views)

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9

10

11

Letter to Paul Demeny. Charleville, May 15, 1871.

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the B/ind: The Self-Portrait and OtherRuins (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 60-63.My distinction between otherness based on identity and othernessbased on the absolute singularity of the other draws on the philosophy

of Emmanuel Lévinas. See his discussion of the face of the other in

Emmanuel Lévinas. Tota/ity and Infinity; an Essay on Exteriority (Pitts-burgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) and of the traumatic characterof the unmediated relation with the other in Emmanuel Lévinas. Other-

wise Than Being: on Beyond Essence (The Hague: M. Nijhoff. 1981).

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York:

Hill and Wang.1981).77Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice" in The Responsibility of Forms.

trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and LA: The University of CaliforniaPress, 1991), 267-77In linguistics these personal pronouns, together with words like “this”

and "that," which take on their meaning according to the context of use.

are called “shifters." See Roman Jakobson, "Shifter, verbal categories.and the Russian verb" in Roman Jakobson, Linda R. Waugh and Monique

Monville-Burston eds. On Language (Cambridge. MA: Harvard UniversityPress. 1990). 115-133.See the catalogue Fiona Tan Mirror Maker (Linz: OberosterreichischeLandesmuseen; and Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2006).Primo Levi, The Mirror Maker, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London.

Abacus, 1997), 55-60.See the catalogue Provenance (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2008) with

an exquisite essay by Fiona Tan.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Regard du portrait (Paris: Galilé, 2000), 48: Nancyalso plays on the notion of "regard" on 71-83.For a discussion of The Change/ing in relation to the archive, see Philip

Monk, Disassembling the Archive: Fiona Tan (Toronto: Art Gallery of

York University, 2007).

RISE AND FALL FIONA TAN

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Fiona Tan: Rise and Fallorganized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. Canada and theAargauer Kunsthaus. Aarau, Switzerland.

EXHIBITION ITINERARYAargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau. SwitzerlandJanuary 30 - April 18, 2010

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, CanadaMay 9 - September 6. 2010

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, USASeptember 18, 2010 - January 9, 2011

Galerie de l`UQAM Montréal. CanadaFebruary 25 - April 5, 2011

Publication coordination: Stephanie Rebick, Vancouver Art GalleryEditing: Judith PennerDesign: Studio: BlackwellDigital Image Preparation: Trevor Mills and Rachel Topham.Vancouver Art GalleryPrinted in Canada by Friesens

Publication © 2009 Vancouver Art GalleryArtwork © 2009 Fiona Tan

Individual texts © 2009 the authors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, storedin a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means. withoutthe prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The CanadianCopyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). Fora copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to1-800-893-5777

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in PublicationRise and Fall Fiona Tan / edited by Bruce Grenville withcontributions from Okwui Enwezor [et al.].

Co-published by: Aargauer Kunsthaus.Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau.Switzerland. Jan-30-Apr. 18,2010 and at the Vancouver Art Gallery.Vancouver, B.C., May 9-Sept. 6, 2010 and then travelling to other venues.

ISBN: 978-1-895442-79-3

1, Tan, Fiona,1966- --Exhibitions. l.Grenville, Bruce ll. Enwezor,0kwuiIll. Tan. Fiona, 1966- IV. Aargauer Kunsthaus V. Vancouver Art GalleryN6953.T36A4 2010 709.2 C2009-906824-9

The Vancouver Art Gallery is a not-for-profit organization supported by itsmembers: individual donors: corporate funders: foundations: the City ofVancouver: the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Counciland Gaming Revenues: the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Govern-ment of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage.

The catalogue and exhibition were realized with5 the financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation.

»..|..... |...»....: Amsterdam-

VancouverArtgallery

750 Hornby Street.Vancouver, BC, Canada V62 2H7

Tel: 1 (604) 662 4700www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

*Aargauer KunsthausAargauer KunsthausPostfachCH-5001AarauT +41 (O) 62 835 23 30F+4l (0) 62 835 23 29kunsthaus@ag.chwww.aargauerkunsthaus.ch

All artworks by Fiona Tan are reproduced courtesy of the artistand Frith Street Gallery, London.

IMAGE CREDITSpp. 22-24, 38-39, 81 installation view of Fiona Tan, Disorient, Dutch Pavilion.Venice Biennale, June 7-November 22, 2009. photo: Per Kristiansen.Stockholm; p. 42 photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery; pp. 46,52-53 installation view of Provenance, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. August27-0ctober19. 2008. photo: Staeske Rebers. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam;pp. 54. 64-65 installation view of Island, MAP Stockholm. October 3-October 26, 2008, photo: Per Kristiansen. Stockholm; pp. 66, 76-77installation view of Mirror Maker, Kunsthallen Brandts. Odense, February25-May 21. 2006, photo: Torben Eskerod. Kunsthallen Brandts. Odense:pp. 72, 75, 85 installation view of Time and Again, Lunds Konsthall,November 24. 2007-January 22 2008. photo: Terje Ostling, LundsKonsthall: pp.92-93 Installation view of A Lapse of Memory, Chapellede Genéteil Centre d'Art Contemporain - Le Carré Scene Nationale,Chateau-Gontier, April 5-June 1, 2008. Photo: Marc Domage/ F iona Tan

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