V

THE CHANGELING

THE OTHER FACE T0 FACE

iviici-iAELNEwMAN

Every portrait can be conceived as a se/f-portrait of the artist

and of the viewer, as well as a portrait of the ostensible subject

whose always present image substitutes for the mirror-image.
And every self-portrait could equally be conceived as a portrait ofthe other, of the as another, to paraphrase Rimbaud!
In addition, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida points out
I

Memoirs of the Blind, in looking at a self-portrait that has

been painted or drawn using a mirror, the viewer takes the
place of the mirror, substituting his or her eyes for the eyes
of the artist, who is thus retroactively blinded?
in

In

Fiona Tan's installation, The Change/ing (2006).

single

image of a Japanese schoolgirl is placed opposite a screen

on which over 200 images of different girls from the same
pre-World War ll high school yearbook are shown in sequence.

the girls were looking directly into the camera when the
photographs were taken, so we have the impression that they
are looking back at us, but from long ago, their frozen pastpresent interrupting our current time. The image sequence
limits how long we can examine each of the many faces before
All

passes away. The single image feels more

something
held and preserved, overcoming time yet imbued with the very
sense of loss for which this preservation partly compensates.
Placing the one face to face with the many sets up a play
of sameness and difference. If we look at how this works
across two axes the distinction between difference and otherness becomes evident. The first involves the relationship of
the images to each other and the second depends on the way
the viewer projects presuppositions onto the image. In this
first way, independently of the viewer, the photographs of the
girls, like the girls themselves, are both similar to and different from each other. They are members of a generation, a race
and, judging by the uniform, an institution, but at the same
time each face, with its unique qualities and physiognomy,
stands out amongst all the others.
But the relational differences between each of the members of this archive of images is not the same as the relational
difference experienced by the viewer who stands outside and
looks, nor the projected possibility of being seen that existed
for the subject when photographed. The axis of sameness and
difference is intersected by that of self and other. The photograph becomes a mirror image-all the more so through its
extension in durational time as video-while the subject of the
it

THE CHANGELING,

like

zoo6 (INSTALLATION vnzw)

NEWMAN

photograph becomes the other of the viewer: the viewer confronts his or her other as image, and an image with a duration
like a mirror image. The question then arises: what is the
relation of this kind of otherness to difference? Put bluntly, is
the other person other because they are different, where this
difference is a matter of identity that is perceivable through
physical qualities and other markers such as racial identity.
gender, membership of a group indicated by clothing, and
so on? But how can these qualities relate to otherness in the

sense of singularity when they are shared with others? The

uniqueness of the other as other cannot be a matter of qualities
and identifications, or even concatenations of them. The singularity ofthe other is beyond, even transcends, these things?
The fascination of a portrait photograph is that the subject
of the photograph overflows the contingency and indifference
of its qualities. The photograph records whatever is physically
there in front of the camera. ln the case of these girls. the format is a standard head and shoulders. The uniformity draws
attention to the way the institution represses difference and
to the conformity of the photographic archive with processes
of social control. Yet, perhaps because we know that it was a
person in her singularity who composed herself and posed
in front of the camera, the image seems to exceed its limits
(and is in this respect like an icon). All the girls are facing
forward, but what, exactly are they facing? The camera? The
future viewer? Themselves reflected in the lens? We are confronted simultaneously with the image of a Japanese schoolliving

the 1930s-the photograph as the that-has-been" of

the moment in which it was taken-but also with an other who
seems to regard us. This other looks at the viewer in the present of an encounter rather than the past of an image, and concerns that viewer in the French sense of regarder as both look
and concern (ga me regarde, literally "it looks at me," means "it
girl of

concerns me," in the sense that the image addresses me

uniquely and calls for me to respond).
While the photograph as a registration of light records a
past moment, the experience of being looked at by the subject of the photograph takes place in the present ofthe viewer,
and the concern to which it gives rise projects a future of
response. All these temporal moments enter into the voiceover that accompanies the images. The photograph represents
both a memory of the past and an anticipation of the future.
The woman's voice, together with the digital presentation of
the image on a monitor, places it in a temporal flow, which
mitigates the status of an archival relic it would otherwise
assume: the image is in the time that carries the viewer on
towards a future that will inevitably involve aging and death.

um cuANr;m,1Nr:, zoo6 (sT1i,i.s)

THE CHANGELING

great success, as people did not want to

be disabused of their illusions by seeing how others saw them.
This reveals something of the truth of the portrait-and the
self-portrait-that the self anticipates how it will be seen by
others. The later Provenance (2008)-six films of people in
some way connected to Tan, shown in their familiar environments and presented on monitors hanging on the wall-was

photograph itself will not change. The voice speaks

from positions that offer the viewer identifications with generations of women-grandmother, mother, daughter-among
who, in more than one place, is the artist. ln addition, each
of the voices of the actors employed to speak in installations
of the work in different linguistic communities has its own
grain" which gives the words a particular texture and speci-

invention was not

ficity, their "body_"5

response to Dutch seventeenth century portrait

painting? The black and white moving images (the subjects
are seen both in fixed shots and in slow tracking shots) have
in principle less physical presence than oil paintings, but
greater temporal presence.
The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the painted
portrait projects itself ahead of itself, like the wake before
the prow ofa ship.1 This also implies a protean quality to the
portrait, which involves less a fixing of the subject in representation than it does an exposure of the subject to the world.
ln mythology and folk tale a Changeling is the offspring of a
fairy or troll who is substituted for a human child: this implies
two things, that someone like us, the same, has been replaced
by an alien other, and that this has occurred through an event
or process of substitution. The act of making a photograph is a
fixing of the subject, both in the registration that takes place
when the button of the camera is pressed, and again when a
print is made. Yet through the temporalization of the still
photographic image, by using a video camera to record an
archival photograph, Tan transforms an object into a process.
ln a number of works Tan places the still and moving image in an

even

if the

Photographs often, and almost inevitably, become unmoored from the proper names of their subjects. Most of us
will have had the experience of looking at family photographs
in albums where names can no longer be put to faces. The
proper name is the linguistic sign for singularity, even if the
subject is only rarely the bearer of her proper name (or, in the
case of a photographic subject, rarely labelled). Without her
name, the girl becomes a subject for identification through a
personal pronoun: an I, a you or a she.6 These are positions
with which absolutely anyone may identify, whether or not race.
gender, or community are shared with the subject of the photograph; they are entirely abstract and universal, and may be
occupied by anyone who knows the language. ln the published
version of the voice-over, attributions of the words to She"
and "I" frame those to "Grandmother" and "Mother" The specification is provided by a narrative fiction into which the viewer
may slide, in this case the implied story of the relationships
between grandmother, mother and daughter. In the circum-

stances of diaspora (Tan was born in Indonesia of a Chinese

father and an Australian-Scottish mother, brought up in Australia and lives in the Netherlands) family becomes an important source of identity. Family is also a particularly important
value in Chinese culture, and in her essay film for television,
May You Live in Interesting Times (1997), Tan went in search of
her Chinese roots. She interviewed the members of her family
now scattered around the world, ending up in the village in China
from which the Tan family originated. I started this journey in
search of mirrors," she says, but realizes that she will never
feel entirely part of her family, nor can she be at home in this
village: My self-definition seems an impossibility, an identity
defined only by what it is not."
Tan named an exhibition of her work in which The Changeling
was shown, Mirror Maker, implyingthat what she is doing in her
work is making devices or mises-en-scene that produce reflections, in the metaphoric as well as literal sense? She took
the title from a story by Primo Levi, in which the mirror maker
fabricates not only flat and distorting mirrors, but also invents
a

mirror that, when stuck to the forehead of someone else,

reflect back to you how they see you. ln Levi's story this

will

explicitly

interdependent relationship. ln Countenance (2002) Tan made

video images of people standing still, Berliners who were classified in the same way as those in August Sander's Menschen
des 20. Jahrhunderts. (She did this as much to show the
impossibility of that project as to follow it.) ln Correction (2004)
Tan used the same procedure with prisoners and guards from
four US prisons. In The Changeling, by giving duration to the

photograph through video, Tan unfixes the photograph's fixity

without abolishing it. Although we know that we are looking at
a photograph, what we are seeing has its own time span.
which is reinforced by the duration of the accompanying
voice-over. In a sense, Tan allows the subjects of the portraits
some space and time to present themselves. In The Changeling
it is as if Tan is restoring this capacity to people who have been
frozen in the image.
The fixing itself becomes a moment in a narrative duration.
but this moment is given more meaning by the voice-over
which cites Daphne and Niobe, two female figures from Ovid's
Metamorphoses, whose stories are described as ... bearing

THE CHANGELING,

2006 (INSTALLATION visw)

NEWMAN

the weight of too much sadness." Daphne, who is fleeing the

desire of Apollo, is turned into a Laurel tree by her father, the
river Peneus. Niobe, whose children are killed because of her
prideful offence to the goddess Latona. turns to stone in grief.
Thus, the freezing of the woman's self in the photograph, juxtaposed to Ovid's stories, comes to seem no mere mechanical

act but a response to the threat of rape and overwhelming

pain. However, this consideration ofthe photograph as a metamorphosis requires that we see it within a process of change
and generation over time.
As with some of her other pieces, Tan`s making of The
Changeling is an act of appropriation, in this case of images
which, in the album or place where she found them, had a context. The persons inthe original photographs would have been
named and so would the school and community to which they
belonged. Although still generally identifiable as coming from
a particular generation, time period and country, even perhaps ofa social class, in Tan's installation the subjects of the
photographs are disconnected from their original, very particular, context. The unease of the viewer at this appropriation is part of the experience of the work, as it was with
Tan's earlier borrowings from the anthropological archive; the

1999 works Facing Forward and Tuareg, for example. ln those

works the colonizing photograph is disrupted by a confron-

tation with or experience of the other in the present time of

viewing, and despite geographical and temporal remoteness,
a spark of unmediated connection is created between viewer

and viewed.
If The Changeling takes over an archive of portraits of others, the voice-over offers the possibility that these images
might constitute a kind of self-portrait. What does the artist
do when she makes a self-portrait? She looks at herself in the
mirror, but what is she looking for? Her self? What, then, is
the relation of self to appearance? And what if, in place ofthe
mirror, a photograph appears? ln answer to the question.

appears in her place. What does the subportrait

photograph is taken of her. whether by
ject do when
herself, or another? She composes herself, presents herself
Who am l?" another
a

as she wants to appear, projects herself towards those who

will see her picture in the future, envisaging herself in their
eyes. So when, at the end, the voice-over says, A self-portrait
in search, yet again, of self," this could refer both to the artist.
Fiona Tan. searching for herself in the pictures of the Japan-

ese girls, of whom we know nothing, and also to those girls.

composing themselves for the portraits which will be presented to us, their unknown future viewers.

THE CHANGELING,

zoo6 (INSTALLATION views)

10

11

Letter to Paul Demeny. Charleville, May 15, 1871.

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the B/ind: The Self-Portrait and Other

Ruins (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 60-63.
My distinction between otherness based on identity and otherness
based on the absolute singularity of the other draws on the philosophy
of Emmanuel Lvinas. See his discussion of the face of the other in
Emmanuel Lvinas. Tota/ity and Infinity; an Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) and of the traumatic character
of the unmediated relation with the other in Emmanuel Lvinas. Otherwise Than Being: on Beyond Essence (The Hague: M. Nijhoff. 1981).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York:
Hill and Wang.1981).77
Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice" in The Responsibility of Forms.
trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and LA: The University of California
Press, 1991), 267-77
In linguistics these personal pronouns, together with words like this
and "that," which take on their meaning according to the context of use.
are called shifters." See Roman Jakobson, "Shifter, verbal categories.
and the Russian verb" in Roman Jakobson, Linda R. Waugh and Monique

Monville-Burston eds. On Language (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University

Press. 1990). 115-133.
See the catalogue Fiona Tan Mirror Maker (Linz: Oberosterreichische
Landesmuseen; and Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2006).
Primo Levi, The Mirror Maker, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London.
Abacus, 1997), 55-60.
See the catalogue Provenance (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2008) with
an exquisite essay by Fiona Tan.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Regard du portrait (Paris: Galil, 2000), 48: Nancy
also plays on the notion of "regard" on 71-83.
For a discussion of The Change/ing in relation to the archive, see Philip
Monk, Disassembling the Archive: Fiona Tan (Toronto: Art Gallery of
York University, 2007).

I2

RISE AND FALL

FIONA TAN

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Fiona Tan: Rise and Fall
organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. Canada and the
Aargauer Kunsthaus. Aarau, Switzerland.
EXHIBITION ITINERARY
Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau. Switzerland
January 30 - April 18, 2010

The Vancouver Art Gallery is a not-for-profit organization supported by its

members: individual donors: corporate funders: foundations: the City of
Vancouver: the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council
and Gaming Revenues: the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

May 9 - September 6. 2010

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, USA

September 18, 2010 - January 9, 2011

Galerie de l`UQAM Montral. Canada
February 25 - April 5, 2011

..|..... |.......:

The catalogue and exhibition were realized with

the financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation.
Amsterdam-

Vancouver
Artgallery

750 Hornby Street.

Vancouver, BC, Canada V62 2H7
1 (604) 662 4700
www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

Tel:

Publication coordination: Stephanie Rebick, Vancouver Art Gallery

Editing: Judith Penner
Design: Studio: Blackwell
Digital Image Preparation: Trevor Mills and Rachel Topham.
Vancouver Art Gallery
Printed in Canada by Friesens
Publication 2009 Vancouver Art Gallery
Artwork 2009 Fiona Tan
Individual texts 2009 the authors

rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored

system or transmitted, in any form or by any means. without
the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For
a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to
1-800-893-5777
All
in

*Aargauer Kunsthaus
Aargauer Kunsthaus
Postfach

CH-5001Aarau
T +41 (O) 62 835 23 30
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kunsthaus@ag.ch
www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch

a retrieval

All artworks by Fiona Tan are reproduced courtesy of the artist

and Frith Street Gallery, London.

IMAGE CREDITS
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rise and Fall Fiona Tan / edited by Bruce Grenville with
contributions from Okwui Enwezor [et al.].

Co-published by: Aargauer Kunsthaus.

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau.
Switzerland. Jan-30-Apr. 18,2010 and at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Vancouver, B.C., May 9-Sept. 6, 2010 and then travelling to other venues.
ISBN: 978-1-895442-79-3

Fiona,1966- --Exhibitions. l.Grenville, Bruce ll. Enwezor,0kwui

1966- IV. Aargauer Kunsthaus V. Vancouver Art Gallery
N6953.T36A4 2010
709.2
C2009-906824-9
1,

Tan,

Ill.

Tan. Fiona,

pp. 22-24, 38-39, 81 installation view of Fiona Tan, Disorient, Dutch Pavilion.
Venice Biennale, June 7-November 22, 2009. photo: Per Kristiansen.

Stockholm; p. 42 photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery; pp. 46,

52-53 installation view of Provenance, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. August
27-0ctober19. 2008. photo: Staeske Rebers. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam;
pp. 54. 64-65 installation view of Island, MAP Stockholm. October 3October 26, 2008, photo: Per Kristiansen. Stockholm; pp. 66, 76-77
installation view of Mirror Maker, Kunsthallen Brandts. Odense, February
25-May 21. 2006, photo: Torben Eskerod. Kunsthallen Brandts. Odense:
pp. 72, 75, 85 installation view of Time and Again, Lunds Konsthall,
November 24. 2007-January 22 2008. photo: Terje Ostling, Lunds
Konsthall: pp.92-93 Installation view of A Lapse of Memory, Chapelle
de Genteil Centre d'Art Contemporain - Le Carr Scene Nationale,
Chateau-Gontier, April 5-June 1, 2008. Photo: Marc Domage/ F iona Tan