Guo-Liang Tan | Peripheral Rituals: Notes on Edges, Attention and Slow Time

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

“And I wonder do animals worry about falling off the edge of things? Do they see edges at all? Do they see an edge as an edge? Is that what the dog in Goya's painting is gazing at, or searching for, as he stares upward into a vast empty yellow void in the sky above him?” — Anne Carson

In this talk, Singapore-based artist Guo-Liang Tan will “stare upward” at the poetics of abstraction and explore some artistic affinities in his work. He considers the affects of atmosphere and time as things that surround the work, like the sky above the dog in Goya’s painting: not subjective qualities, but not objective, either. Time is marked in processes — repetitions, (anti-) gestures — and also in resonances between different practices and different bodies of works. In particular, the artist will discuss the notion of “edges” in relation to colour, bodies and space, and how these shape and shift our sense of attention. By moving between reflections on Tan’s painterly practice and his ongoing interests in moving image and dance, the artist’s intermedial and open-ended mode of inquiry searches for ways to de-centre the subjective and expressive in the way we think about painterly forms and ideas. The talk will focus on recent bodies of work that move between painting, installation, sculpture, and event. 

Guo-Liang Tan is a visual artist whose practice centres on painting, from which works in other media and modes of presentation occasionally emerge. Surfaces, whether painterly or not, serve as sites for staging gestures of affect and a haunting dialogue with the ghosts of abstraction. His process is marked by gaps and overlaps, fragmentation, and the gathering of traces. Tan is particularly interested in how these elements expand and reorient our perception of the body, time, and attention. Guo-Liang Tan has exhibited work at Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; and Sifang Satellite Space, Shanghai, Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum, Iceland, among others.

Image: Guo-Liang Tan, Another Folding Scene, Sifang Art Museum Satellite Space, 2024. Photograph: Ota Fine Arts.

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 17 February and 21 October 2025, co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore and Alia Parker.