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Fiona Tan - Ascent, Tilburg

De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands

11 February 201711 June 2017

Press Release

The internationally prize winning artist Fiona Tan (Indonesia, 1966) is a good friend of De Pont Museum, where she had her first major exhibition in the Netherlands in 2003. Today the collection includes a broad range of her work. For her second exhibition in Tilburg, the museum's recently opened new wing will be transformed into a viewing space for her new installation Ascent. This large, two part installation has been conceived as a montage consisting of more than 4000 photographs of Mount Fuji, submitted by the public or selected from the collection of the Izu Photo Museum. No other mountain has been photographed as often as Mount Fuji: from all sides, from a close proximity, from a distance, from above, at every moment of the day and in all seasons. Venerated as a god and used as a symbol of the nation state Japan, this volcano has mythical meaning. Mount Fuji is an icon as well as a cliché, in roughly the same way that windmills and wooden shoes have this status with respect to the Netherlands.

Ascent is a reflection on this mountain that has such great significance to the Japanese, but also a study of its visual culture and a tribute to the history of both photography and film. Tan combined the images with a fictional narrative, which causes the distinction between still and moving images to shift. She thereby reveals a unique realm in which photography and film come together and interrelate. The story, resounding with the climb to the top of the mountain, alternates between narration and history, from Western imperialism to modern tourism, from the early days of photography to the present day. In addition to the film, the exhibition at De Pont includes two other video installations. The Changeling (2006) and Depot (2015) likewise balance on the borderline between still and moving images.