Sylvia/Xinran Tan,
curatorial, snapshots













that I curated...



Ghost Dance, Jimei Art Centre, Xiaman, 2024-2025

Unanswered Call, CHOWspace, Shanghai, 2024

Ripples, Hypha Gallery 2 Sugar House Island, London, 2024


The Place of Indivisible Existence, CHOWspace, Shanghai, 2024
Belong and Belongings, Eaton HK, Hong Kong, 2023




that I assisted...



Silo Dreams, Keyi Gallery, Hefei, 2024

Modern Time: Masterpieces from the Collection of Museum Berggruen / Nationalgalerie Berlin, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA Edge), Shanghai, 2023

Liquid Ground, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2021

Curtain, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2021

M/Made in Shanghai, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2020

PSA Collection Series: Shanghai Waves: Historical Archives and Works of Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2020

Workshop: Wu Tuo Bang—Construct a Utopia World with Your Imagination, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2020
Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre


Ghost Dance


Jimei X Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image, Jury Panel’s Special Mention
Jimei Art Centre
11/29/2024 – 01/12/2025

Curator: Starry Chen, Sylvia Tan
Artists: Laura Chen, Carô Gervay, Ance Janevica, Lee Kai Chung, Hester Yang, Tianyi Zheng

In the film Ghost Dance, Jacques Derrida, improvising the role of a professor, when asked whether he believes in ghosts, answers: The cinema is the art of ghosts…It’s the art of allowing the ghosts to come back.1 Imagery retains and summons haunting memories of the past, while memories, by projecting onto images, acquire “grafts” of spectrality.2 The dialectical image, in its interaction with humans, is a suspended sway between life and death, alienation and new meaning, becoming a spectral Nachleben amidst historical alternation. 

The exhibition “Ghost Dance” employs image archive as a ghost medium and memory technology. Featuring photography, video installations, and archival works, it aims to reveal the spatial and temporal disjunction within geopolitical diaspora and personal archives, attempting counter-chronicle activation, reconfiguration, and continuous overwriting of the image Nachleben. 

Despite the global nomadism envisioned by digital media, the perpetual homelessness of transnational diasporic identities still lingers and causes a mal-être. Those who depart undergo a dual erasure, both physical and narrative, by their homeland, becoming “irrelevant others” excluded from a solidified national identity, as though severed yet enduring. The nostalgic specters, whether unable or unwilling to be eradicated, transform into a desire for archive amid fragmented temporal and geographical experiences. In the exhibition, private image archives and visual reconstruction of historical documents spotlight how the hyper-rationality of archival technology can be undermined and disrupted by subjective emotions, the heterogeneous ruptures hidden in the spectral experience, and even writing fallacies of diaspora. Meanwhile, this archive fever (mal d’archive), driven by compulsion of self-sustenance and self-preservation, is often inscribed by a self-destructive death drive,3 where writing and erasure of memories parallel. Through the “archiviolithic” tendency of archive, the exhibition not only addresses image archive as an existence of personal and collective memory but also explores how it dances as a ghost, between presence and absence, to extend the retelling of migration and archive its own narratives through enduring ephemerality.

1 Ghost Dance, directed by Ken McMullen (1983), 16:00-17:00.
2 Antoine De Baecque, Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, no. 1-2 (2015): 26-27.
3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11-12.

Feature/Press
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre ->
The Art Journal ->
Artisle ->



Unanswered Call
Duo Exhibition by Zheng Kaijia & Zhou Chi


CHOWspace, No.2, Lane 41, Yuqing Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai
08/24/2024 – 09/30/2024

Based on a longstanding understanding of the instability of subjectivity, “Unanswered Call” explores how the body, as the materiality of subjectivity, suspends and interrogates external discourses, disciplines, and constitutions. The exhibition focuses on two artists' painting practices regarding bodies and human subjects – Zheng Kaijia pays attention to the multiple forms of identity existence through self-portraiture, contemplating the fickleness of perception and the deceptive notion of a complete subject; Zhou Chi presents how the body "escapes" from predetermined values, dogmas, and frameworks through flowing lines, emancipated through creation and release.

As informed by concepts including interpellation and the mirror stage, the exhibition is grounded in the dynamics between subjectivity and external mechanisms, along with how it transforms into an introspective reconfiguration of identities. Althusser's theory of interpellation emphasizes how society hails individuals to specific identities through ideological apparatus, thereby legitimating them as social subjects.1 Lacan's mirror stage points to the existence of an idealized self constructed through external mirroring and the gaze of the Other, whose inherent dislocation and incompleteness reflect the innate split of subjectivity in self-identification.2

The exhibition focuses on moments of unanswered call where the body finds itself in a paradoxical situation of asking to be interpellated as a subject by the very social values that exclude it. The "exile" state of apatride implies a temporary suspension of identity, as described by Paul B. Preciado in his essay "My Body Doesn't Exist", where the body is perceived as a "non-existent existence" excluded from the mainstream, an insurgent institution without constitution.3 The instability of subjectivity turns against the language of those who name it in order to deny it, disclosing the destitution of existing frameworks. Employing this body image as an intervention, the exhibition explores how the highly fragile, ambiguous, and unstable subjectivity represented by "non-existent existence" exerts constraint and resistance to the highly rational orders. 

1 Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.
2 Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage”. In Social Theory: The Multicultural Readings, edited by C. Lemert, 343-44. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 1949.
3 Preciado, Paul B. “My Body Doesn’t Exist”. In The Documenta 14 Reader, 117-34. Prestel: 2017.


Producer: Yuhui ZhouArtistic 
Consultant: Junyao Chen
Curator: Sylvia Tan
Curatorial Assistants: Qifei Jiang, Yunhan Jin, Zhaohan Lu




RIPPLES


Hypha Gallery 2, Sugar House Island, London
08/09/2024 - 09/13/2024

“RIPPLES” presents an evocative collection of installation, film, painting, photography, and mixed-media works by 20 emerging artists from the Royal College of Art (RCA). This exhibition challenges conventional narratives and delves into decolonial discourse through personal and communal lenses.

In our belief that there is no singular way to address decoloniality, we initiated an open call, inviting artists and curators at RCA to exchange their intimate reflections on decolonialism. Upholding principles of openness, care for reparations, and reflection, we selected 20 artists/teams and eight curators, each establishing a cohort that reflects their varying visions on the topic that ranges from discourses on diaspora communities to generational trauma and related social and cultural phenomena.

Under the themes of observing the history of control, resistance, and knowledge; transnational ways of knowing and value repatriation; and hidden narratives emerging and re-discovering identities, RIPPLES explores how decoloniality can be analyzed and mediated in contemporary times and offers an intergenerational platform to initiate and reflect on the decolonial discourse, not from the imperialist viewpoint but from personal narratives.

The exhibition will feature engaging conversations with curators during the private view and an array of programs throughout the exhibition period, such as artist talks that delve into the range of practices and performances of a healing ritual aimed at addressing the impacts of colonialism.


Artists: Amy Sarr, Canaan Brown, Chrysa Kanari, Emily Alice Mitchell, Gugan Gill, KV Duong, Lujane Pagganwala, Maria Helena Toscano, Ume Dahlia, Mariana Sánchez Hernández, Muhammad Muhammad, Ningyue Qian, Leopoldo Alejandro Farrera Cuevas, Rita Fernández, Shruti Gaonkar, Weiyue Sun, Weng-Io Wong, Yicai Pan, Yucen Liu, Yujin Son

Curatorial Team: David Tomlinson, Huiyui Lan, Jacqueline Schwartz, Pon Chanarat, Sylvia Tan, Tim C. Huang

Directed by Jane Lee, Luis López, María Helena Toscano, Polo Farerra, Ume Dahlia
RIPPLES is supported by Hypha Studios and made possible by Sugar House Island.


Website ->

Photo: Carlo Zambon, Leopoldo Alejandro Farrera Cuevas





Ripples - Artist Talk #2
Value Repatriation: Transnational ways of knowing/unlearning


Hypha Gallery 2, Sugar House Island, London
08/23/2024 19:00 - 20:00

Featuring: Amy Sarr, Lujane Pagganwala, Weng-io Wong
Moderated by Sylvia Tan

The artist talk invites audiences for an engaging discussion on Value Repatriation and explores transnational ways of knowing/unlearning. To break boundaries and rigid concepts of formats, we aim to make the dynamic of the artist talk more playful through a game-like sharing method. This approach encourages engagement and mutual exploration among artists.


Photo: Leopoldo Alejandro Farrera Cuevas


The Place of Indivisible Existence


CHOWspace, No.2, Lane 41, Yuqing Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai
07/26/2024 - 08/21/2024

“If existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Through hidden site specificity, “The Place of Indivisible Existence” presents paintings by eight artists who, utilizing direct visual languages, pay attention to daily life through personalized micro-narratives, providing empirical slices and cognitive maps representing the current transient and flattened zeitgeist. Touching on themes of material landscape, cultural identity, symbolic language, myth, and subconsciousness, the exhibition explores the complexity of their dislocated yet inseparable coexistence with existing history, memory, and entities.

“The Place of Indivisible Existence” takes its title from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), which imagines Marco Polo’s descriptions of fifty-five fictitious cities to Kublai Khan featuring general commentary on culture, language, symbols, time, and memory. Borrowing the signifying system, the exhibition unravels the former French Concession area of Shanghai, where CHOWspace dwells, as an “invisible” context. Within it, the coexistence of pseudo-nostalgic memory interpretation and neo-consumerist business models exemplifies a discontinuous spatial narrative that not only indicates wider hybridized states of heterogeneous time, cultural hybridization, and symbolic polysemy but also exists as a social space produced through their topological extension.

Amongst the intensifying postmodernist loss of grand central narratives, the exhibition considers participating artists’ alienated conversion of daily life scenes as a micro resistance, intending to disrupt the traditional order of reductionist narratives. The silent yet complex iconography of paintings reflects conflicts between the certainty of material entities and the untranslatability of cultural symbols and linguistic rhetoric. The exhibition points to the omission, slippage, and overlap of discursive configurations, focusing on where geographic, cultural, and imagined space shifts, mingles, and reconstructs, aiming to explore the spatial-temporal potentials of obtuse meanings.


Producer: Yuhui Zhou
Artistic Consultant: Junyao Chen
Curator: Sylvia Tan
Curatorial Assistants: Zhaohan Lu, Xinping Wang

Artists: Taiping Cao, Chang Liang, Chen Yinan, Lim Kaye, Wu Yusang, Mengfan Xia, Xie Xuanxuan, Ann Yan




The Enigma of Arrival


Studio Building, RCA Battersea, London, 2024
11/29/2024 – 01/12/2025

"Diasporas are always categorised by various forms of absence.” - John Akomfrah

The Enigma of Arrival is a curatorial project consisting of three artist commissions and a workshop. Borrowing its title from V.S. Naipaul’s novel, it delves into the intersections of time, identity, and diaspora, reflecting the enigmatic nature of settling into a new time or place. Challenging linear time, this project explores the fragmented nature of diasporic experience, where memory, nostalgia, and rebirth intertwine in a haze of past and present.

Featuring commissioned works by Joshua Woolford, Rieko Whitfield, and Duong Thuy Nguyen, a synergistic blend of audio-visual, sculptural, and collaborative media is presented. Woolford’s peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must narrates a personal perspective within an unfamiliar landscape. Questions of the untold are manifested through a communication between Woolford’s dual-screen display and Whitfield’s Diasporing Terrains – an audio-visual installation resulting from an intimate workshop, redefining the concept of diaspora. Meditating on ideas of memory, belonging, and adaptation, this is framed by Nguyen’s We, Now, Here, There, Together, a sculptural display exploring diasporic communities and their ancestral ties.

We invite visitors to engage with the dynamic and multifaceted nature of diasporic existence.

Mark your arrival, feel the absence.


Artists: Duong Thuy Nguyen, Joshua Woolford, Rieko Whitfield
Curators: Ahwa Habeeb, Clara Lai, David Tomlinson, Hannah Dowling, Qinle Jin, Sylvia Tan, Yu Ying Chan
Photographer & Videographer: Wenxuan Wang
MA Curating Contemporary Art, School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art

Instagram ->

Photo and video: Wenxuan Wang



Diasporing Terrains, Workshop led by Rieko Whitfield


Stevens Building, RCA Kensington, London
06/06/2024 15:30 - 19:00

Featuring meditation and automatic writing, the workshop explores fruits and flowers as metaphors for tenderness, hope, and resilience in the alchemising of grief – to co-create alternate landscapes beyond the gates of the coloniser’s garden.

From this workshop, Rieko Whitfield will be creating an audio-visual installation which will form part of the exhibition The Enigma of Arrival.

Artists: Rieko Whitfield
Curators: Ahwa Habeeb, Clara Lai, David Tomlinson, Hannah Dowling, Qinle Jin, Sylvia Tan, Yu Ying Chan
MA Curating Contemporary Art, School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art


Photo: Clara Lai



Fragile: Please Handle with Care

Bridge Studio, 3rd Floor, Woo Building, RCA Battersea, London, 2024

Fragile visualizes the lack of stability and constant displacement caused by the ongoing housing crisis in London.

Currently, we’re all being affected by a variety of issues affecting housing in London. Whether that’s poor condition, rising rent costs, lack of renters’ rights, or the increased gentrification of areas, we’ve become to feel a part of. This exhibition displays a body of work looking at our own experiences of living in London. We don’t have all the solutions but we can document, create work, and explore these problems through our own lens.







Belong and Belongings


Eaton HK, Hong Kong
04/09/2023 - 04/19/2023

"Belong and Belongings" brings together groups of artworks to present the long haul of searching "who I am", revealing the possibilities of multiple identities in between society and individual, pieces and completion, break and rebuild. The exhibition approaches identity as a matter of becoming that undergoes constant transformation, and as a continuous play of history, culture, and power.  It involves four parts of identity formations — family, nationality, gender, and social class — to present the state of self-finding as a lifelong wandering journey. 

"Belong and Belongings" is co-curated by students from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, interpreting the hotel Eaton HK, an alternative exhibition space, as a stop during a journey that allows travelers to head to their next station, but never a destination. Gathering the imagination towards "identity" by the group of artists and the curatorial team, the exhibition integrates videos, installations, artifacts, and other artworks in Eaton HK's food hall, corridors, and lounge. Displaying art and cultural artifacts in unconventional locations, the exhibition creates an immersive and engaging viewing experience, challenges traditional interpretations, and generates new meanings for the pieces. 

Whether you are here for a break from the hustle and bustle of the city, or you fly over thousands of miles to stop over, you can still find your belongings. 


Exhibition Catalog ->




Silo Dreams


Keyi Gallery, 15# Building, New Grain Warehouse, Shushan District, Hefei, China
10/01/2024 - 11/17/2024

As the inaugural exhibition of Keyi Gallery in Hefei's New Grain space, “Silo Dreams” begins with the establishment of this special exhibition space - the shifting focus of silos built at the end of the century from storing grain reserves to the production of contemporary culture. The architectural transformation and scenario rotation of the exhibition space is a shift in the application of social space. The exhibition sees it as a projection of social activities and economic development transformation, specifically demonstrating the flow of postmodern labor and production relations under the dominance of the emerging technology industry, algorithmic logic, and the platform economy. It outlines and explores the current situations and challenges facing the contemporary city through non-linear connections between social relations and spatial structures. Gathering paintings, videos, sculptures, and site-specific installations by 12 artists, the exhibition analyzes and responds to the contemporary production and organization of social relations, based on drastic changes in the social production structure and its resulting spatial and temporal mobility, hoping to provide perspectives for interpretation, reflection, and tackling of socio-spatial practices that are present now, and will be more prevalent in the future.

The predecessor of New Grain, Anhui Mechanized Grain Depot, was constructed in 1992 as a collection of grain purchase, storage, processing, and commerce to promote grain reserves and circulation, responding to the social contexts and demands of the time. Nowadays, the 6 grain silos, as industrial heritage, have been repurposed as art spaces, and New Grain has been reconstructed as a new cultural and commercial venue in urban renewal. The translation of micro social life scenes symbolized by the functional alternation of the granary space becomes a representation of the changing social practice. The concrete wall with remaining rice husks stands as a monument to record the change of the times; The texture and significance of the space itself becomes an index revealing the social and productive change of the space. When the socioeconomic structure and labor relations become increasingly complex, flexible, and decentralized, the postmodern labor force and social relations of production are shifting towards the temporary and unstable. Regardless of the changing times and architectural functions, the special space of the granary, with its respect for the supremacy of labor, is always a fertile and romantic symbol for present discussions.


Artists: Chen Pai'an, Gong Bin, Jing Ao, Li Guanshuai, Li Penquan, Li Tao, Li Xindi, Li Li Ren, Song Long, Wan Chaoqian, Xie Linyou, Xing Wanli
Curator: Junyao Chen
Curatorial assistant: Sylvia Tan
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