Helena Tan

Ashley Berlin is proud to present the first solo exhibition by artist Helena Tan in Berlin.

In the exhibition Full of It, Helena Tan presents a body of new work that addresses contemporary ideas of socio-diasporic identity. Departing from the writing of Anne Anlin Cheng, diasporic subjecthood is thought through and against the conflation between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. Through an engagement with specific materials, objects, and infrastructural systems, Helena’s work addresses crucial material and cultural economies, using a unique synthesis of everyday forms to locate these sometimes vast, difficult to grasp structures within an individual’s embodied, everyday experience. By layering narratives in material assemblages that parallel her diasporic experience, her work is invested in meaningful understanding and averting the reduction of an identity.

Helena Tan is an artist from the UK, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Her work is informed by contemporary socio-cultural symbols and signifiers, with an interest in how systems become constructed, exoticised and appropriated over time. She is currently an MFA candidate at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, New York, USA.