SIANFAN
范仙

BIO

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Sian Fan is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist working between Essex and London where she is artist in residence at Somerset House Studios. She is currently the inaugural Design Trust X V&A East Research Fellow where she is researching her Chinese Hakka heritage and will create a new commission for V&A East's Stories of Clothes season. From 2021-22 she was the Digital Wonderlands artist in residence at the V&A Museum and prior to that she was an artist in residence at Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation from 2020-21. She is a graduate of the Fine Art Masters course at Central Saint Martins, where she was awarded the prestigious Mona Hatoum Scholarship and was nominated for the Nova Award. In 2014 she graduated from the University of Brighton's BA Performance and Visual Art Dance course, where she was awarded the prize for Outstanding Creative Achievement from Seoul National University. 

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She has exhibited internationally with institutions including HEK Basel, MUTEK Barcelona, Kunsthal Rotterdam and FACT Liverpool, as well as producing work with Channel 4, the BBC and Meta. Notable recent projects include False Idol, a solo show at Somerset House, Lure a solo presentation and performance at Gazelli Art House for Women’s Art Week and Glimmer, an interactive commission for the major exhibition CUTE at Somerset House. Sian also does lectures, seminars and discussions and has worked with universities, schools and institutions including UAL, V&A Museum, Norwich University of the Arts, Goldsmiths, DanceEast and Whitechapel Gallery.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

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My work combines movement, the body and technology to explore embodiment, identity, and human experience in the digital age. Drawing on my background in contemporary and aerial dance I suspend, augment, and interrupt the body via choreography and digital media. My work manifests as a meshing of the physical and the virtual, taking form as sculpture, costume, performance, animation, installation, and new media.

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Coming from mixed heritage (Chinese/British) my practice meditates on my tangled identity, exploring the magical potentials and everyday tensions of existing in between worlds. I attempt to dissect my murky relationship with my Asian heritage, reflecting on authenticity, diasporic experience, and the multifarious images of Asia. I am particularly interested in popularised depictions of Asiatic bodies in movies, anime and video games; in folkloric stories both modern and traditional; and in the thresholds of human identity where one exists as both and neither at the same time.

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By extension I am fascinated by the fabrication of identity, in the tensions between the authentic and the mediated, and in how we draw from modern and manufactured materials to construct our sense of self. I am interested in how in our increasingly digitized and hyper-connected reality these meta-selves extend out of our physical bodies, into the surrounding atmospheres of hyperspace and beyond.

Much of my work explores transformation, as a process that I see as being both mediated and mystical. I shapeshift concepts through multiple mediums, transforming, evolving and mutating ideas through layered processes in an effort to reflect the complex and multidimensional reality of being human. I am interested in exploring the tensions that we experience as mediators between physical, metaphysical and technological realms and through my work I seek to discover new ways to coexist with technology.