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Helena Tan

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Fluff but it’s still life (2026) from my thesis this summer @bardmfa curated by @mike.r.curran

Thank u Anton, Halsey, Jade, Mike, Lisa, Asier, Taylor, Bill, Rin, Lotus, Trisha, Claes, Megan, Maggie, Ayla, Robin, Delia, Leto, AusArt and my class xo

Documentation by Kunning Huang by @hs1an

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a month ago

I love birthday presents. taken in Stockholm, Sweden by @hs1an

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2 months ago

‘Ajar’ is now down. So grateful to have been invited to work on my first show in Australia at @animalhousefinearts and to everyone who came to say hello

Thank you to Trisha Low @tuhreesha for accompanying me throughout and contributing a wonderful essay, and special thanks to Anton, Steven, Leto, Lisa, Nell, Ayla, Peter, Ryan, Jesper, Piotr (smoke technician) and Matt. Amelia Winata @winnyyoyo published a review which is now up and can be found at Memo review @memo_review by @hs1an

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6 months ago

by @hs1an

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6 months ago

I love you and I miss you Pedro by @hs1an

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7 months ago

Worlds now bigger taken in Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture by @hs1an

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a year ago

More documentation of “Full of It” by Helena Tan from last December!

“Moving either up against the wall to your left or towards the nook behind you, you take a closer look at the abaci. Stripped of their function, their transformation is a conversion from instrument to ornament. Arrested in motion, they enframe images of the porcelain cabinet at Schloss Charlottenburg. Behind the rods of the abacus the extravagant decadence of Chinoiserie congeals a fantasy of China as artifice. Captured with a cybershot camera, they allow you to take up an embodied view, a gaze that gazes back at the orientalising gaze from above, in defiance of an Ornamentalism that serves but the needs of Western society. Here, you are offered pause to think through and against the conflation between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. You are reminded of Anne Anlin Cheng’s poignant words: ‘Ornamentalism—the forging of the sense of personness through artificial and prosthetic extensions—articulates an allegory for the crisis of personhood that the modern ideal of an integrated, organic, individual person was meant to alleviate.’”

@hs1an
@ste.pdf by @hs1an

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3 years ago

Three months ago today we closed “Full of It” by Helena Tan—feeling sentimental to be sharing the last of the documentation shots!

“Ever shifting between abstract and concrete modes of representation, Full of It sustains the tension between the lived experiences of diasporic subjects and the calculatory forms employed by society and state authority to document them. By defamiliarising objects not normally deemed worth attention, this body of work materialises not in spite of but because of the lack of a proper border between embroidery and body.

Reorienting the peripheral and supplemental as the pivot, she/it is a powerful prosthetic, a materiality of being that assembles personhood through synthetic rather than organic means. Both aesthetic congealment and full-bodied edifice, she/it brings into view an alternative form of life, not as the fantasy of an autonomous modern subject, but as the fully sensorial, vibrant presence of the ornamented body. Her/its emptiness is not synonymous with vagueness or arbitrariness. She/it is carnal and delicate, hot and cold, corporeal and abstract, a full and empty signifier.”

@hs1an
@ste.pdf taken in Ashley Berlin by @hs1an

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3 years ago

Delighted to announce “Full of It” by Helena Tan! Please feel warmly invited to join us for the opening this Friday, December 8, 7-10 PM.

Helena Tan is an artist from the UK, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Her work is informed by contemporary socio-cultural symbols and signifiers, with an interest in how systems become constructed, exoticised and appropriated over time. She is currently an MFA candidate at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, New York, USA.

Invitation poster with Eliott Déchamboux @lile.nova 🩶 taken in Ashley Berlin by @hs1an

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3 years ago

taken in Jeti Pulau Ketam by @hs1an

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5 years ago

my show— GreenLuggAge
is opening tonight as part of @norbergfestival 's art program at Torggatan 2 -

From tomorrow it will be open 12-18, come by i’d love to see you there ♡

Special thank you to
@lile.nova , @linalundquistt and Alice Söderqvist by @hs1an

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4 years ago

I like this pony by @hs1an

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5 years ago