Image: Reference image of an ais kacang dessert, sourced by Jay Tan.
Pension Planning
JAY TAN
November 16, 2024 – February 2, 2025
Guest writer: DERICA SHIELDS
Muddling through misunderstandings of macroeconomics, Pension Planning begins with the daunting task of climbing a mountain. Approached through the D-I-Y decorative aesthetics of high-school art class, YouTube videos and kinetic cardboard crafts, the exhibition stands as a kind of visual slang, in which the symbolic, sacred, stereotyped, systematic and silly are blended together into a three-story diorama.
Navigating these inclines, which literally span the three floors of our building, we climb through Tan’s attempts to meld an unwieldy visual and linguistic lexicon. As the topography unfolds, they morph reconstructions of fragmented cultural references ranging from confusing-maybe-racist images, longed-for traditions and validating personas. The delay and distortion of Asian diasporic nostalgia is an intergenerational dialogue reluctantly translated by bilingual cousins—an ‘Ornamentalist’ [1], made-up, megalith-y glossary, born of a blunt application of fake-it-till-you-make-it.
Off the back of this, within the social landscape of ageing populations and countries that ‘get old before they get rich’—where government bonds and investment funds call into question whether ethical communal welfare funds could or ever did exist—this exhibition metaphorically postures towards the task of saving for retirement, a mountain often impossible to climb. Prompted by their own parents’ difficulty retiring, and tethered to spending time alone as an adult in Malaysia—where their father hails from— Tan has been trying to understand and reconsider practices and responsibilities of ancestral worship and filial duty. When the material realities of pension planning come into play, this intergenerational dialogue (with both the living and the dead) is not just a tool of self-definition, or cultural investment, but a lived necessity.
In being confronted with the challenges of ageing and money, and at the same time learning about how much work ancestral worship can be, Pension Planning plots out the tension between financial and spiritual well-being, one born from the diasporic reality of clumsily teaching oneself your culture (in the face of another’s priorities), where rituals pull from the past and present simultaneously—think, a votive filial offering of the latest Lexus mini-van.
[1] Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Biographies
JAY TAN (1982) is an artist working across sculpture, performance, sound and video. Working with everyday household materials as well as D-I-Y approaches—such as home craft techniques of self-taught mechanics—Tan creates worlds in which cultural vernacular is both interrogated and rewritten. Decoration as aesthetic rubble. Through these processes, they are trying to figure out how the history of British Colonialism (in Malaysia specifically) brought their parents together and influenced their worldview. Born in South London, now based in Rotterdam, they completed the MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2010, were a 2014/15 resident at the Rijksakademie and currently teach at the Masters of Artistic Research programme at KABK, Den Haag, and the Fine Arts Department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
DERICA SHIELDS is a writer and editor from London. She works across disciplines with a particular focus on Black aesthetics, cultures and epistemologies. Her oral history project A Heavy Nonpresence gathers seven Black Londoners’ accounts of the British welfare state and was published by Triple Canopy in 2021. She was a 2022–2023 artist-in-residence at Jan Van Eyck Academie where she developed ‘Given to Cottons and No Silk’, a two-channel video installation. Her book Bad Practice, which considers the potentials of Black failure, is forthcoming from Book Works.