Jack Ky Tan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Galloway, Southwest Scotland.
Working across, performance, sculpture, law and policy-making, his practice is an ongoing exploration of social justice that blurs the boundaries between, art, law, governance, and consultancy.
Interrogating the legacies of colonialism with a particular interest in the Maritime South East Asian diaspora, Tan looks toward alternative cosmologies and knowledge systems that predate the Judaeo-Christian and colonial narratives. Questioning these embedded structures in our society and economies which form our laws and guide our behaviour, his work attempts to rethink our entanglement with the human and non-human world and look towards alternative ways of living and working.
Drawing on his own cultural heritages as his points of departure, Tan will use the residency to explore the language of ceramics and how different epistemologies can be used to consider ideas of identity, the histories of colonial bureaucracy, and the Asian body. During the residency he will also spend time researching Chinese glazing techniques from the Tang Dynasty, considered the golden age of Chinese enlightenment. In particular, he will explore Sancai ceramic glazing styles and their potentiality for expressing both abstraction and the figurative in relation to contemporary concerns.
