Eliza Tan

I am an art historian specialising in contemporary art and visual culture, with a particular focus on East Asia within wider regional and global contexts. My research addresses the representation of memory and the intersection of performance and protest cultures, and centres on the political agency of practices that grapple with legacies of war and occupation, histories of violence, and colonial erasure.

Prior to joining the University of Brighton, I co-led the MA in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. As a current member of the department of Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston University, I teach on the BA Fine Art and Fine Art and Art History courses. My AHRC funded PhD thesis exploring the intersection of postwar memory, feminism and art activism in Japan in the 1990s through the lens of pioneering feminist Yoshiko Shimada’s archive and broader East Asian women artists’ networks was completed at the same institution. I hold an MA History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and BA (Joint Hons) History of Art and English from the University of York.

In addition to the independent projects which I have collaboratively realised with artists, I have worked in the areas of exhibition curation and curatorial research, public programmes, visual arts grants management as well as press and public relations with organisations including the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, Solomon R. Guggenheim New York, Singapore Art Museum, National Arts Council Singapore, and Art Forum Berlin. My writing has appeared in publications including the Oxford Art Journal, n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, ArtAsiaPacific and documenta 12 magazines.

I welcome projects concerned with the impact of material and sociopolitical transformations on artistic developments in East and Southeast Asia; which query relationships between art and globalisation; the representation of memory and construction of diasporic subjectivities in post-colonial, post-conflict contexts; feminist interventions and strategies of resistance; artists and the archive; performance and the aesthetics of protest.

I teach modern and contemporary histories of art and approaches to heritage, critical art theory and visual methodologies. I lead core Level 5 modules 'Spaces and Bodies'; Level 6 modules 'Art and Visual Culture in Communities' and 'Constructing Histories' and the MA module 'Heritage in a Global Context'.