Chooc Ly Tan is a multi-disciplinary artist, music composer and DJ. With a background in sculpture and performance. Their practice explores how alternative visions of reality can emerge by subverting or repurposing systems used to understand the world — drawing on concepts from physics, politics, and music. Often, Tan draws attention to power imbalances, using moving images and sound to find an experimental cadence within the personal histories, found archives and political undertows that inform and inflect the Afro-Asian diaspora, in the face of ongoing colonialism(s). Worldbuilding functions in their work as a tool of subversion, proposing radical optimism as a force for reimagining dominant power structures.
As a composer and music producer, their practice synthesises concrete noise with abstract synthesis, classical instrumentation with frenetic beats, field recordings with the alien soundscapes of cosmic forests: an unorthodox, politically charged way of working that defies both popular and avant-garde categories.
Their work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery and RIBA, London; Celestial Festival, Berlin; Chale Wote Film Labs, Accra, Ghana; Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE; and Osmosis Audiovisual Media Festival, Taipei. They have participated in talks as part of the Sonic Culture programme, CalArts – California Institute of the Arts; Decolonising Queer Artistic Space and Practice: Critical Dialogue with Asia-Art-Activism; and Signals: Experiments in Sound at the Tate Modern, London.
Links:
Goldsmiths Profile
Website
Image Credit: videostill from Kent Chan, Gasworks