Erika Tan

Biography

Erika Tan is an artist, researcher, curator, and Reader in Contemporary Art Practice. She is Course Leader for MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She studied Social Anthropology and Archaeology at King's College, Cambridge, and Film Directing at the Beijing Film Academy, before completing an Advanced Diploma in Film & Video and an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins.
Tan's interdisciplinary practice is research-led and spans moving image, installation, digital media, publication, curatorial projects, and participatory formats. Drawing on her background in anthropology and film, her work investigates postcolonial, transnational, and decolonial questions through archival research, exhibition histories, contested heritage, cultural memory, and the movement of people, objects, and ideas across borders. Her projects often engage with overlooked narratives, institutional histories, and the politics of representation, employing speculative and critical approaches to reframe established histories and systems of knowledge.
A recurring focus of her work is the relationship between museums, colonial histories, visual technologies, and contemporary forms of cultural restitution. Research interests include the connections between museum display and cinematic technologies of displacement, the digitisation of collective memory, and methodologies for recovering overlooked or forgotten historical subjects. Recent projects have explored the legacies of colonial collecting practices, Southeast Asian art histories, the transnational circulation of cultural heritage and potentialities of machine learning.
Tan has exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and biennials, including Singapore Biennale; Diaspora Pavilion, Venice; Artist & Empire, National Gallery Singapore; As the West Slept, World Trade Center, New York; By All Estimates, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Persistent Visions, Vargas Museum, Manila; Mining the Archive, Centre A, Vancouver; Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves, ZKM, Germany; and Cities on the Move, Hayward Gallery, London.
She has received commissions from organisations including National Gallery Singapore, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Film & Video Umbrella, BBC Radio London, and Channel 4. Her work has been recognised through awards and fellowships including the Samsung Digital Art Prize nomination (2012), an ACME Fire Station Residency, and the Arts Foundation Digital Arts Fellowship. Her first publicly funded video work, Passing (1993), was supported by the Arts Council's Black Arts Video Award and most recent projects have included Slideshow Party: A Feminist Sharing of Art and Other Provocations, presented as part of Singapore Biennale 2023; Ancestral Revocations, a sound installation shown at Tate Modern (2025) referencing Southeast Asian material in Tate and Wellcome Collections; and Sour Kana: All That Is Solid Melts Into A Mass Of Sticky, Dark, Mess (2023) shown at Tang Contemporary, Hong Kong and the Nguyen Art Foundation Vietnam (2024).
Alongside her artistic practice, Tan has developed an extensive curatorial and research portfolio. She has curated and managed projects including The ICA in China, Imaginaria Digital Art Prize '99, HUB@The RiCHMiX, and The Supplementary Museum Brighton. She has also maintained a longstanding engagement with the Chinese arts sector in Britain, working as a community worker, researcher, curator, and consultant. Ongoing curatorial projects include Sonic Soundings / Venice Trajectories, a geolocative sound project initiated in Venice in 2017 (SonicSoundings).
Tan's publications include Barang-Barang, a 4-meter-long concertina handmade publication developed through the Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship at Kingston University; Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don't You? / Sila Mengakanibalkan Kami, Mahu Tak?, produced in conjunction with her solo exhibition at NUS Museum, Singapore, and And Now China?, a special issue of Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art examining the impact of China's rise on contemporary art discourse in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Recent research projects include participation in the SOAS-led Ghetty funded Circumambulating Objects: On Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (2023-25), which investigates restitution and decolonial approaches to Southeast Asian cultural heritage (SOAS Project Website), and the AHRC-funded Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage initiative, part of the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, which explored critical and creative approaches to collections, heritage, and institutional transformation resulting in work shown at Tate Modern (Transforming Collections). She is also a member of GPS (Global Performance Sound Lab) (2025-26), an international network of artists, researchers, and practitioners supported by Rutgers University. The network supports collaborative research across sound, performance, place, and expanded artistic practices, and has included a residency at Arts, Letters & Numbers in upstate New York (Global Performance Sound Lab).