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M+, Hong Kong, © Hans Tan
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East Galleries, 218
Hans Tan 陳彥翰
Spotted Nyonya—Candle Holder 點點娘惹──燭台
2011
In his practice, Hans Tan obliquely reinterprets and draws from vernacular archetypes found in Singapore by tinkering with contemporary design morphology and manufacturing processes. In the Spotted Nyonya series, tradition is reinvented not through addition or mimicry, but through subtraction. Tan masks historic Malay-Chinese Peranakan ceremonial ware with a dotted motif made of vinyl stickers, and then sandblasts the vessels. The stickers protect the image underneath, and the vessels are adorned with bold new geometric patterns when the process is complete. Pour, on the other hand, resulted from Tan’s questioning of the resin-casting method by seeking to ‘mould without a mould’. He was inspired by the preparation of kueh lapis sagu—a traditional steamed pastry—and cast a table surface upside down, without walls to hold the liquid resin in. The samples demonstrate Tan’s system of using an epoxy resin that is viscous and that quickly hardens, producing a surface strong enough to function as a table top. Each colour is poured with precise control of curing time to avoid mixing, to achieve a seamless multi-coloured surface.
In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections. M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, 22 June–30 September 2018
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