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Dancing With Dad
5 Jan – 19 Jan 2012
Light Edition Gallery
Exhibition statement
The journey of life resembles dancing in many ways. We learn the steps as we grow, and strive to stay in synch with others as much as we could by developing patterns and rhythms to establish a routine. But sometimes, life decides to change its tune. Without warning, a new tune challenges our ability to adapt and find synchrony.
Dancing With Dad celebrates the artist’s discovery and contemplation on the human spirit, love and relationship as he negotiates the unfamiliar sequence while journeying with his Dad who suffers from Para Supranuclear Palsy (PSP)- a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells controlling walking, balance, mobility, vision, speech, and swallowing. Through an array of artistic outputs that includes photography, drawings, text and minuscule sculptures, the artist takes his audience on an intimate sharing of the new steps he has learned in his in order to adapt to this new tune in his life. Alongside the autobiographic overtone, the work also offers the audience a glimpse of the cathartic quality found in the process of making art. For the artist, the creation process offered him solace and retreat at challenging time. Art gave him space to suspend, to take distance and process life’s circumstance. For him, this work, which took almost 4 years of internal processing stands as a totem of liberation and embrace.
Lastly, this body of work also created a unique opportunity for the field of Medicine, Medical Humanities and the Arts to converge. The exhibition invites its audience to reflect on the synergies from this intersection; encouraging one to consider how artistic production may offer an alternate access to understanding disease and inform the production of knowledge on illness. Click to view/ download catalogue.
Michael Tan Koon Boon 