The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Fiona Tan’s video Cloud Island 2010 opens with the sound of helicopters whirring over a group of islands set between a clear sky and still blue water. As the view of the islands nears, the sound fades and the screen cuts to black; a slow pan across a rough surface follows, finally revealing a decrepit internal space. Tan’s camera traverses a pair of tattered blinds through which we glimpse an overgrown garden. Already a journey of discovery has begun. A series of almost-still images — vine-covered power lines, crumbling buildings, sites in various stages of decay, as well as a small port — are rendered in close detail, forming visual clues that viewers may attempt to decode in order to locate themselves in the narrative. The site of exploration is Inujima, a small island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, and one of the locations that Benesse Art Site Naoshima has attempted to reinvigorate as an art destination. 1 Tan filmed Cloud Island in May 2010, just as the first phase of the Inujima Art House Project — set up to ‘introduce art spaces into daily life, and . . . transform the scenery of the island’s residential areas’ 2 — was being completed. Due to depopulation and ageing, only around 50 people remain on Inujima, and Cloud Island finds its form as a portrait of their lives. For much of the film’s duration, Tan documents the daily routines and rituals of the island’s elderly residents as they carefully tend their gardens, their homes and their animal companions. In something of a departure from previous work, Tan builds the film’s narrative solely through editing. Images and scenes are cut together to construct a sense of this contained world, its inhabitants, their unhurried lives, and the changes that are rapidly encroaching. On her approach to editing, Tan has said: With montage, the editing and cutting of a film, the director not only dictates the order in which scenes are presented, but also their exact length. The impact of sound, be it spoken word, music or ambient sound, is much greater than many people realize. I am interested in exposing and exploring all of these mechanisms. I want to empower the subject, empower the viewer, and to bring aspects to the surface, to create a certain visibility, if you like, to foster awareness of our interpretation of the images that surround us. 3 Only a few scenes contain dialogue, and, importantly, Tan chooses not to subtitle. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, the camera trails over an old black-and-white photo album. A woman’s hand gestures to the photographs and we hear her narrating each image. She pauses on one — a suburban skyline — and traces the edges of the photo with her finger. In intimate scenes such as this, Tan’s focus lingers as though trying to capture every last detail of the way things are, or were. The film’s languid pace mirrors life on the island and moments of waiting accumulate. The act of waiting functions as a metaphor for the passing of time. For Tan: Time, history, memory, they are all connected; they are facets of the same globe. As an artist working almost exclusively with time-based and lens-based media, time is one of my major tools . . . time is both tool with which to shape and chisel and material to fold, distort and configure. 4 One of the first residents to appear in the film is an old man asleep beneath a tired-looking umbrella in his garden, his soft snoring echoing the rise and fall of his shoulders. In another scene, Tan’s camera tightly frames a man’s timeworn, yet animated, face as he watches intently and then frowns; when the camera pulls back we see him sitting in front of his small shop. Later, a group of women with bicycles and barrows chat and sing as a boat approaches. Seemingly mundane acts are interspersed with poetic moments: a man is fly fishing in a calm sea, a woman is standing at her window watching a storm roll in. These scenes enable Tan to draw out the meditative nature of the act of waiting, and to suggest something of the psychological landscape of her film’s subjects. The progress of the Inujima Art House Project is revealed only in the last ten minutes of the film, when the mechanical grinding of an excavator interrupts Tan’s image of the peaceful, if entropic, island. Through close observation, Fiona Tan has created a melancholic familiarity with her subjects. As the island’s residents stoically continue with their lives, the film’s final moments are enveloped by a deep sense of nostalgia. Cloud Island is a portrait made at a particular moment in time, in which we can see the island’s past, present, and glimpse its future. Zoe De Luca 1 Benesse Art Site Naoshima is the collective name for the art activities conducted by Benesse Holdings Inc. and Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation; see Benesse Art Site Naoshima, <http://www. benesse-artsite.jp/en/inujima-arthouse/index.html >, viewed 27 August 2012. 2 ‘Other facets of the same globe: A conversation between Fiona Tan and Saskia Bos’, in Marente Bloemheuvel (ed.), Fiona Tan: Disorient: Dutch Pavilion [exhibition catalogue], 53rd Venice Biennale; Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2009, p.23. 3 Fiona Tan: Disorient: Dutch Pavilion , p.26. 4 Fiona Tan: Disorient: Dutch Pavilion , p.26. FIONA TAN Shifting tides FIONA TAN Indonesia/Netherlands b.1966 Cloud Island (stills) 2010 Single-channel HD video projection, 47:00 minutes (looped), 5.1 surround sound, colour / Images courtesy: The artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo 209