Kai Syng Tan

• Interdisciplinary creative collisions and ‘productive antagonisms’: art as a process of interrogation, dialogue and intervention; working with artists, academics and non-academics across disciplinary (Latham and Tan, 2016), artistic, cultural and geopolitical boundaries.

• Arts in health: Cultural narratives in wellness. Complicating dominant discourses on 'normality', neuro-normativity and 'illness' via through an ‘ill-disciplined’ approach by highlighting  neuro-divergent, female viewpoints. Chinese Taoist mind-body poetics and disability perspectives as counterpoints to Cartesian and medical models.

• Body and mind in motion as creative and critical toolkits in a world in motion (and commotion) to engage with self, community, technology, place (in particular the city) and non-logocentric modes of thinking.

• Running as arts and humanities discourse: running as methodology, metaphor, material. ‘Running studies’. Art and mobilities.

• Research-practice-teaching nexus: The practice-theory dynamic. Innovative possibilities of ‘practice-led research’ and ‘publication’. Areas: installation, performance, drawing, mapping.

• Widening access and participation: working with ‘non-traditional’ students. Internationalisation.  

I am a Visiting Researcher and Personal Tutor at the Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre and its first Artist in Residence (2017-2018). My mentor is Professor of Psychiatry Philip Asherson (2017 NIHR Senior Investigator Award). I am also a Peer Review College member for UKRI Future Leaders and Arts and Humanities Research Council, Director of RUN! RUN! RUN!, Research Committee Member of UK Adult ADHD Network (UKAAN) and Advisor for PsychART. In addition, I am Visual Director and Communications Director of Philbeat, a creative company in Singapore. I belong to an emerging generation of artists who are also researchers. A key aim of my work at SGDP is to contribute towards improving how mental health is understood which will be necessary for policy change. I want to disrupt discourses that stigmatise and isolate mental illness via innovative processes of artistic intervention. More generally, I generate connections between the academy and the creative arts industry, and between research and creative practice. Rather than solving problems, I use art to energise existing discourses, instigate new conversations across disciplinary boundaries such as psychiatry and create new 'problems'. My contribution to knowledge lies in combining distinct concepts and practices together to generate new insights. Curatorially this involves designing innovative, accessible and non-intimidating platforms for researchers, arts & health professionals, service users as well as ‘the general public’ to learn, un-learn, share, and ask new questions.

Currently I try to achieve these aims via an art-science collaboration entitled We sat on a mat and had a chat and made maps! #MagicCarpet. This is a 1.5 year practice-led research project weaving visual art and research and lived experience of ADHD together to explore mind wandering and the boundaries between 'normality' and 'abnormality'. Funded by Arts Council England, this project is commissioned by Unlimited and supported by Cultural Programming. The work has been enjoyed at the Art Workers’ Guild, South London Gallery, Southbank Centre (for 700 viewers), Nesta’s People Powered Future health (for 500 health policy people), UK Adult ADHD Network Congress 2017 (for 400 ADHD researchers and professionals), the Arts in Mind Festival (covered on Resonance FM and South London newspaper, and including a workshop with a primary school) as well as the 5th European Network for Hyperkinetic Disorder International Conference in Edinburgh (for 500 health professionals). Audiences have been aged 2-85. #MagicCarpet has been covered or published in BJPsych, Big Issue, Mind the Gap blog (an EU-funded platform for European scientists), featured in 4 films including one commissioned by Economic and Social Science Research Council at the invitation of Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences Professor Louise Arseneault, and another for the pan-European training network MiND. An article on neuordiversity in women published on Disability Arts Online was one of its top editorials. In 2018 it was awarded the National Coordination Centre for Public Engagement NCCPE Images Competition 2018 Award under the category of 'Culture Change’. 

#MagicCarpet draws on my 24-year track record as artist, curator, lecturer and consultant. I activate everyday mobilities such as, running, islandhopping, swimming/crawling/hula-hooping/drowning and mind wandering as critical and creative modes of interrogation and intervention. By extension, I consider my own role as a connector, disrupter and ‘running-messenger’ who is ‘ill-disciplined’, situated within, between and across artistic, disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries to engineer spaces of ‘productive antagonisms’ (Latham and Tan 2016). Characterised by agility, exuberance, hyperactivity, as well as a risk-taking sensibility and refusal to be pinned down, this framework is (in)formed by the collaging of a range of concepts and practices, and underlined by my lived experience of ADHD, dyspraxia and dyslexia. As a teacher, I specialise in creating innovative student-centred, research inquiry-based learning environments that foreground the messiness and joys of working with and through difference. Since 1998, I have taught in the practice, theory and history of fine art, media art, film and higher education (BA-PhD), including at Royal College of Art, UCL, Goldsmith’s University, Australian National University and LASALLE College of Arts (Singapore). I particularly enjoy mentoring students who are international, BAME, disabled, or mature. I have been Research Fellow or Visiting Research Fellow at University College London's Institute of Advanced Studies, Lancaster University's Centre for Mobilities Studies and Leeds Arts University. 

My work is recognised for its ‘eclectic style and cheeky attitude’ (Sydney Morning Herald), ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ (Professor Alan Latham, UCL). I am described as ‘not only a talented artist but also a great scholar’ (Cinema South Festival) with a ‘sardonic humour but also a sharp intelligence which makes her a self-reflexive, incisive artist of South East Asia’ (Singapore International Festival of Arts Director Keng Sen Ong). My performance, critical text, film and installation have appeared in 450 platforms including at Documenta, Royal Geographical Society, Biennale of Sydney, Tokyo Fashion Week and Medical Research Council Preview Festival. Venues include MOMA (New York), ZKM / Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Tokyo Metropolitan Photography Museum, and Moscow International Performing Arts Centre. Recognition includes San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award, Artangle Open 100 and the Young Artist Award (conferred by the President of Singapore). Collections include the Museum of London and Fukuoka Art Museum. Publications include Sport in Society (Routledge), Cultural Geographies (Sage), Live Arts Developmental Agency Study Guide and Royal Society of the Arts blog. Collaborators have included Professor Helen Chatterjee MBE (creative health), media collective VideoArt Centre Tokyo, Dumb Type choreographer and dancer Takao Kawaguchi (Tokyo), composers Professor Christophe Charles (Tokyo) and Philip Tan (Singapore). Curators I have worked with include Rikrit Tiravanija (NYC/Berlin), Keng Sen Ong (Singapore) and Dr Charles Merewether (Australia). I have been billed with Yayoi Kusama, Fluxus artist IImura Takahiko and avant garde filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto. Of my RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale, the Guardian urges academics to ‘take a leaf out of its book’ (2014), and I was invited to speak on BBC Radio 3 talking about on running as an artistic discourse (Free Thinking January 2017). Co-created with disabled colleagues, the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 8th ASEAN Para Games (for which I was Visual Director) was applauded by the Singapore Prime Minister as ‘spectacular’.