Fiona Tan

Biography

In spring 2025 the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam announced that its summer exhibition, “Monomania”, would be put together by Fiona Tan. No contemporary artist had received such an invitation before. For the exhibition, drawn from the museum’s collection, she also made a new work, “Janine’s Room”, commissioned by the museum.

She was born in 1966 in Pekanbaru, on Sumatra. Her father was an Indonesian Chinese and her mother Australian, of Scottish descent according to some accounts. Her early childhood was spent in Melbourne. In 1984 Tan moved to Europe and has stayed here.

From 1988 to 1992 she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and in 1996–1997 at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. In 1996 she won the Prix de Rome for film and video. A year later came “May You Live in Interesting Times”, a documentary with an autobiographical note; at the Netherlands Film Festival it was recognised as the best national debut. Another well-known work of those years, “Vox Populi”, is assembled from photographs in private archives and family albums: a great many small pictures add up to one large whole. Her work is often built on self-portraits and portraits of people from different cultural circles and different social classes, and the line between document and fiction in it is fluid. In 1998 Tan received the J.C. van Lanschot Prize for sculpture, and in 2004 the Infinity Award for Art of the International Center of Photography in New York. Solo presentations have been held at the New Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the De Pont Museum in Tilburg and the Kunstverein in Hamburg. She took part in Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), in the biennials of Berlin, Istanbul, Sydney and São Paulo, and in the Yokohama Triennale. Her works are in the collections of Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Schaulager in Basel.

In 2001–2002 she lived in Berlin on a DAAD scholarship, and in 2003 received an IASPIS grant and residency in Stockholm. From 2006 to 2014 she taught in the postgraduate programme De Ateliers in Amsterdam, then at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.

The Venice project “Disorient” (2009) was later shown at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. For St. Lawrence’s Church in Alkmaar she made a design for a stained-glass window said to be the largest in Europe. In 2017 Tan received the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts.

In 2016 she directed her first feature film, “History’s Future”; her second, “Ascent”, was shown at the Locarno Film Festival. That same year she was artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In 2019, after a residency at the Mundaneum in Belgium (a repository created by Paul Otlet to catalogue all human knowledge), she completed the photography and film project “L’archive des ombres” (“Shadow Archive”); an exhibition of the same name was held at Grand-Hornu. In the same year she received the Spectrum International Prize for Photography.

Her third film, “Dearest Fiona”, was shown in the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival in 2023. Archive footage of the Netherlands from the early twentieth century is accompanied by a voice-over: a letter her father wrote to her thirty years earlier, when she moved to Amsterdam to study. Image and sound connect two continents. She lives and works in Amsterdam.