Caught in the Middle - Camden Art Centre

Following research developed through artist Jack Ky Tan’s Studio Residency at Camden Art Centre in 2022, Tan now undertakes a curatorial research residency with us.

In 2022, Tan explored the legacies of empire, ‘the Asian middle’ and the loss of the colonial dream – now he undertakes a curatorial research residency at Camden Art Centre exploring the history, politics and legal aesthetics of the Asian Colonial Middle, a termed coined by Tan to describe the colonial conditions and structures created by the British Empire and East India Company.

Through artistic and curatorial approaches, his research considers the modes of refusal that can emerge from within current structures of neocolonialism that are a live legacy of Empire.

Stemming from work he developed through his Studio Residency this new body of research looks towards new bureaucratic futurisms that can be imagined and aims to provide the grounding and context for a presentational output that:

(1) explores the history and conditions of being the Asian or colonial middle;

(2) offers strategies for surviving in/as the middle today; and/or

(3) imagines alternative bureaucratic or organisational futures, worlds and infrastructures.

The study begins with archival visual and legal research into the creation of an Asian bureaucratic class in 19th century British South and Southeast Asia whose role was to act as English enculturated native middlemen. Through developing an understanding of the aesthetics of this Asian and colonial middle, Tan will explore its manifestation and legacy in today’s politics and visual culture. Finally, Tan’s research looks to see how artists, particularly those from Commonwealth heritage, are responding today to questions of complicity and entanglement in the colonial middle, and how they are imagining different bureaucratic futurisms.

This research will culminate in a public outcome at Camden Art Centre in 2026.

The Artist

The Artist

Jack Ky Tan works across performance, sculpture, installation and institutional critique. His practice is an ongoing exploration of social justice that blurs the boundaries between, art, law, governance, and consultancy. Looking toward alternative cosmologies and knowledge systems predating Judaeo-Christian or colonial narratives, he is interested in interrogating the legacies of empire with a particular interest in Commonwealth and Tropical epistemologies of resistance. By questioning how embedded societal structures form our laws and guide our behaviours, his work attempts to rethink our entanglement with the human and more-than-human world and looks towards alternative ways of living and working.

Tan was Camden Art Centre’s Studio Residency artist in 2022. He is Guest Curator of Organisational Development at John Hansard Gallery, devising an anti-racist project evaluation framework for the Centre for Equity and Inclusion at the University of Sheffield and is currently developing a new body of work around decolonial tropicality through the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Visionaries programme.