Silver Award in Space and Object, The Sage

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Designer: Tan Zeen

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This is an art installation developed from a 1:30 scale model of a performance space. I created this art piece for the exhibition at WSD2025 and it incorporates my understanding of the distinct natures of performance space and exhibition space.

 

The exhibition space and the performance space are two fundamentally different environments. The key challenge is how to ensure that what the audience sees in the exhibition is a work of art in its own right, rather than merely its shadow—such as production photos, videos, scale models, etc. How can the exhibition participants relive those significant moments experienced within a performance space? I believe that "translation" is a crucial process here: transforming a performance design piece into an artwork in exhibition space, while preserving its equivalent artistic value.

 

In WSD2025, The Sage adopted this curatorial strategy in the exhibition space. From several different sites in this performance, I selected one and created a 1:30 scale model of it. This model is placed upon a school desk, an important object within the space, as if it had dreamily grown forth from the desktop. This set of desk and chair has been stripped of all its layers, revealing the cold, bare metal of its construction.

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On a sheet of paper, I describe this process of making:

I took this old desk and chair, and little by little, I scraped, I rubbed, I smoothed it down, until the raw grain began to show itself. And in that slow, patient unveiling—this gradual revealing of what lay beneath—I was carried back, as if to the performing space, to those moments in The Sage that spoke directly to the heart.

 

All the material that was removed and dismantled during this process has been carefully collected and displayed together in glass bottles. These include six components:

Surface Paint Scrapings / Fragments

Protective Coating Abrasion Powder

Metal and Rubber Fittings / Components

Wood Dust

Sawdust

Tree Bark / Fragments

 

Additionally, parts dismantled from the chair:

Back Rest (Bent Plywood)

Seat Pan (Bent Plywood)

 

Removing the decorative exterior to reveal the essence is one aspect I wish to express in this work. Furthermore, when these elements are displayed together, they appear as if they still constitute a whole, presented to us in another, fragmented form—imbued with a sense of tragedy and contemporary metaphor.

 

Audience can feel a kind of "pain" akin to dissection.  And this is precisely what audiences within the performance once felt. My endeavour is to make those vital moments once experienced in a performance space manifest once again within the exhibition space.

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