Fiona Tan: Cloud Island
My first experience of Fiona Tan was back in the 53rd Venice Biennale with her show Disorient in the Dutch pavilion. I recall that the work was simultaneously stunning, very beautiful and intensely warm and heartfelt.
The work I first encountered, and which sticks so clearly in my memory, were from the piece Provenance (2008) displayed at the show. Concerned with people and portraiture, the images had an alluring luminosity that I could not understand, until of course these still images shuffled slightly, moved. These were not images at all, but high definition films; the audience encounter with them thus changed drastically. You were experiencing another person, through film, in a very intimate way; it breathed life into portraiture in a way that I have not experienced in some time.
So, naturally, I held high expectations of the film Cloud Island at the Frith Street Gallery in London. And my expectations were met.
The intimacy is still there in Cloud Island; Tan visited a remote Japanese island for the film, with an aged population and with her film she gets into the fabric of their reality. Any dialogue is rendered unimportant; this is very much about the incommunicable experience of the place, the people and their peaceful existence, just as Provenance was equally about that unspeakable quality between people.
It becomes almost as if the audience were another member of the island society, helped along with the occasional ‘conversation’ the audience has with a woman showing photographs. But of course the conversations are in Japanese, so the audience is offered some distance, and the lack of narrative throughout the film imitates the indifference of life.
Don’t think however that Tan is cold in her approach; quite the contrary, she lets us indulge lazily with the islanders, as if wandering on a Sunday afternoon, taking in the sounds, the scenery and the people. Though Tan is in control of the audience, you don’t feel forced into this kind of serenity; that simply would not work. The audience is lulled into the islander’s pace, an especially great feat when you consider that Frith Gallery’s closeness to the bustle of Piccadilly and Soho – the audience immersion is complete.
One particularly poignant moment is when the audience catches a man asleep in his garden. We just watch him, breathing heavily, as insects float by. We watch for a while, gentle voyeurs, and drink in the scene, with its calmness, and perfect, but not distracting, composition.
Thus Tan does not disappoint; she transports us to the island wholly and completely, the audience powerless to resist, totally immersed in the lives of these people, feeling a kinship without words, experiencing a true portrait.
