Lisa Tan is an American artist and educator based in Stockholm, Sweden. She works with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures. Her own experiences of desire, loss and otherness are drivers for explorations into consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and the role that representation plays in shaping a person’s relationship to the world and to others. Writing figures largely in her work, and she regularly draws from literature, literary theory, and the history of photography. 

She received a MFA from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, where she lived for several years, before relocating to New York. In the years following, she pursued her art and exhibition-making, while also working a day job at an interior architecture firm. In 2010, she was accepted to the practice-based PhD program at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. This, along with a partner based in Stockholm, is what eventually brought her to Sweden.

Lisa Tan’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With) (Rotterdam), MIT List Center (Cambridge), Kunsthall Trondheim, ICA Philadelphia, Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Tabakalera International Center for Contemporary Culture (San Sebastian), Contemporary Art Gallery CAG (Vancouver), and Artists Space (New York). Tan’s work was presented in the 11th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA) (2021), osloBIENNALEN First Edition (2019-2020), ever elusive, Transmediale festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017), Why Not Ask Again?, the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), Surround Audience, the Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015). Her artist book Sunsets, Notes From Underground, and Waves, is published by and available at Archive Books, Berlin. 

For more, see lisatan.net