Kent Chan

Interview by Christopher Rey Pérez

Kent Chan’s artistic practice inverts the colonial imaginary to find the coordinates for encountering the realities of the tropics during a time that has proven to be too short-sighted to envision their future. What’s revealed at these latitudes and longitudes of elsewhere is the resource of fiction, an abundance of material equal to the abundance of the tropics, which narrates heat’s relationship to art and recollates the history of modernity. This past December, following his selection for the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize, I had the chance to speak with Kent over Zoom about Aristotle, a very white island in the Netherlands, tropical vernacular architecture, dystopia, and much more. We also talked about some of his recent works, such as A Tropics Expanded (2020), Heat Waves (2021), and Seni (2019). It was my morning to his evening, we both had mustaches and, in his frame, a kitchen sink and dish rack were in the background to his right. In mine, one ex-voto from Mexico City I had hung on the wall.

Christopher Rey Pérez (CRP): How long have you been living in the Netherlands? I was looking at your website and saw that you are based between there and Singapore. I was wondering whether you move back and forth or if you're now, given the pandemic, stuck in a place that is not too tropical.

Kent Chan (KC): I came to study in Amsterdam from 2013 to ‘15, met my partner, and then stayed until 2016. In 2016, we moved to Singapore, and in 2019 I came back for a year-long residency. The pandemic hit, and I’ve been here since. It’s been two years and a month since I last went back.

CRP: Wow.

KC: Yeah. Also, Singapore has had really strict quarantines until recently, so that's why it's kind of prohibitive to go back, both time-wise and financially, you know?

CRP: How do you feel that’s changed or informed the work you do, given that Singapore is a place you have not had access to? In A Tropics Expanded, there seems to be a kind of preoccupation with thinking about the consequences of climate change and how tropical regions of the world might develop elsewhere too, like the Netherlands where you're now based, or other places that are currently not known for tropical climates.

KC: It's kind of funny, right? Okay. Two things. I'm Chinese-Singaporean, and I can't trace my lineage past my grandparents. I'm not really sure when they settled in Singapore. So, because I'm Chinese-Singaporean, my ancestry is not indigenous to the tropics. It’s subtropical at best. The other thing is that when I joined Jan van Eyck’s residency in 2019, there was a new director, and there was a certain kind of positioning towards the climate emergency. I realized that I may look at the tropics, but I always look at them as a way of looking at issues of decolonization, even if I get shoehorned into the conversation on climate.

The tropics are the part of the globe where almost everywhere was colonized. In many ways, I look at colonization as a way to look at the history of, for lack of a better word, race. Or racism. The idea of racism was developed hand in hand in relation to heat, if you want to trace it all the way back to Aristotle or whatever, yeah?

"The tropics are the part of the globe where almost everywhere was colonized. In many ways, I look at colonization as a way to look at the history of, for lack of a better word, race. Or racism. The idea of racism was developed hand in hand in relation to heat..."

A Tropics Expanded, 2020

Single-channel film, duration: 24’35

CRP: Are you talking about how philosophers thought that demeanor is based on climate—the kinds of tropes that still exist today about folks who live in hot climates being hot tempered?

KC: Yeah, definitely something like this. The word “tropics” comes from “trope,” so the tropics themselves are a trope. The origin of the tropics comes from something called the torrid zone, which Aristotle came up with, back when philosophy was also science, and science was philosophy. Aristotle wrote that beyond the temperate zone of Europe was the frigid zone to the north, which is the Arctic belt. And he said, “Oh, it's too cool for people to live there!” And he also said that anything south of the temperate zone, which is essentially the tropics, is the torrid zone and that it's too hot for people to live there as well.

Western philosophy has been racist towards other climate zones for over two thousand years. Racism is deeply rooted within temperature. If you look at most of the colonial journals, they often mention how the tropics were too hot and humid to think. There's this air of unintelligibility linked to the tropics, and that's why artworks from the tropics never enter the art museum. Historically, they've always gone to the anthropological museum to be left out of the art canon. That's my beef with this whole idea about the tropics. That's why I look at them.

CRP: So maybe there's a utility to having migrated, to being stuck in the Netherlands throughout the pandemic. You can look to see how the trope of the tropics has migrated to Europe as well. You can think about how the art of the tropics is received and reimagined outside or elsewhere from the tropics proper.

KC: Yeah. Totally. A Tropics Expanded is meant to be a starting point for another project, and whenever I have to write about that project, I always say that the temperate zones—the West—colonized the tropics. But the tropics also colonized the temperate zones. I'm not even making this up! The tropics are expanding. I'm pushing the idea of tropical expansion to a degree, but there is some scientific basis to this as a starting point.

CRP: What's your impulse to push these realities to such a degree? In A Tropics Expanded, I love the disjunction between the narrative and visual. The stories told of climate change and of life on water, of reduced land mass, seem extreme in comparison to the enjoyable, pleasant tours that everyone is taking.

KC: I shot the work in residency, and the residency is on this tiny little island called ... I don't speak Dutch, so Pampus, I guess. P-A-M-P-U-S. It’s an island the Dutch reclaimed in the late 1800s. After they reclaimed it they built a fort on it. The fort never saw any active military action, so it was left in disrepair. Then, in the 2000s, which is a very 2000s and ‘90s thing, they revamped every modernist building into a museum. That's what happened to Pampus. They made a museum out of the fort. Now people go there for day trips. It's really small. At the widest, it's like one hundred fifty meters across. I don't know how many feet that is.

CRP: It's tiny.

KC: Yeah. It's tiny as hell. It takes you maybe seven minutes to walk around the island. You can dock your boat and go to the café and grab a bite. They do events. I say “café,” but “café” in the Dutch sense. It's also a bar. And the royal marina is nearby. The Dutch queen would sail there to have lunch. That kind of thing, you know? It's a leisurely place.

I always talk about A Tropics Expanded in the sense that there's a certain kind of inertia about doing anything on the island. Everything seems normal. It’s the Netherlands, so everybody's white on it, except for me and the folks that I brought in to film. I had to deal with this reality that the people most responsible for climate change are the ones that have to deal with the effects the least. And vice versa.

In this work of fiction, whenever I think, “What if the tropics became global?” I think about how people would migrate from the tropics to the temperate regions, and at some point it's like white America’s fear that it's not going to be white anymore. That's what I am looking at. The temperate zones populated by people not from the temperate zones.

"Western philosophy has been racist towards other climate zones for over two thousand years. Racism is deeply rooted within temperature. If you look at most of the colonial journals, they often mention how the tropics were too hot and humid to think. There's this air of unintelligibility linked to the tropics, and that's why artworks from the tropics never enter the art museum. Historically, they've always gone to the anthropological museum to be left out of the art canon. That's my beef with this whole idea about the tropics. That's why I look at them."

Heat Waves, 2021,

Two-channel video, duration: 21’20 Venue: De Appel, Amsterdam

CRP: Have you by any chance read Hayy ibn Yaqzan? It's a 12th century book, so it's old, somewhat obscure.

KC: Actually, no. But it sounds kind of interesting.

CRP: It's by an Arab philosopher named Ibn Tufail, who was part of the Aristotelian tradition we discussed earlier. In the opening pages, the narrator talks about an unnamed place that lies near the equator and has the ideal climate to allow human life to auto-generate from the elements. This human then gains the faculties of language and reason and deduces that there must be a creator. I mention it because it speaks to an imagined tropics and the question of what kinds of abundance the tropics can offer in their expansion to other climate zones.

I’m also thinking about how in other works, like Heat Waves, imagined futures are just as important for thinking through what will become of the tropics and the world as a whole. And I’m not certain that you’re looking at things through a dystopian lens.

Do you relate to dystopia? Or is that not a productive way of imagining a tropical future for you?

KC: One of the things that I have had to look into is climate past and geological time. I realized that there was once a period of time when semi-tropical forests were just a couple hundred miles from the North Pole. At some point, it gets so humid that water will not evaporate. And it doesn't take many more degrees for the tropics to become unliveable, which is not something that I can conceive.

I can imagine the tropics moving, though. I think the future tense of the tropics, if things ever spiral to that extent, would have tropical climates in temperate zones. But what happens in the tropics themselves is something that I find hard to imagine.

One thing always talked about is how the tropics know how to deal with heat. If you look at tropical architecture, for example, there is an emphasis on windows and airflow. That's what you see, for example, with Art Deco when it was adapted to Miami. It became a specific form of Art Deco, a tropical Art Deco.

I think what I'm trying to say is that there's a vernacular of the tropics that has historically, for hundreds and thousands of years, always meant that people know how to deal with heat. I have a certain kind of stubborn refusal to want to even think about the tropics as being unliveable. I prefer to think about the tropics as this place where people glean knowledge from dealing with heat and extreme climatic situations. Vernacular tropical architecture is one example.

"There's a vernacular of the tropics that has historically, for hundreds and thousands of years, always meant that people know how to deal with heat. I have a certain kind of stubborn refusal to want to even think about the tropics as being unlivable. I prefer to think about the tropics as this place where people glean knowledge from dealing with heat and extreme climatic situations. Vernacular tropical architecture is one example."

Hot House, 2020

Wood, PVC strips, heater, humidifier Venue: De Appel, Amsterdam

CRP: That makes me think of… I mean, there are plenty of historical examples for dealing with what future catastrophe might look like. One of them is Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria.

KC: Yeah.

CRP: A friend of mine’s parents built their house according to the logics of accommodating the tropics that you talk about, except they installed glass windows, which blew out with the hurricane! Her parents then left the island to move to Kuwait and gave her the house. In order to prepare for impending, future catastrophe, my friend decided to not replace the windows.

KC: I have to say, there's a certain kind of smarts or creativity in not just the tropics but the developing world that makes a lot of sense, and which the West lacks to some extent. What is the saying? “Necessity is always the mother of invention.” Or something like this. I'm not suggesting it’s sufficient to solve all problems, but there is a certain ingenuity of the tropics.

One of the reasons why I had to make Heat Waves is because these kinds of ideas are being appropriated. For example, pharmaceutical companies had anthropologists who would go to different tropical areas to engage with different villages or tribes and find out what local, herbal medicine or plants were used and for what purpose, before trademarking them. Then the communities themselves couldn’t use them.

That's one of those things that, in a less dire, less nefarious way, you see in other industries and scenes, like pop and musical genres of Latin origin. You see it enter more and more into the American mainstream. But it comes from a certain place, and it stems from the aesthetics of heat.

One idea I have about everywhere getting warmer is that the West will claim these aesthetics as heat accumulates in these areas too. The fact of the matter is, it is happening, and it does happen. And I guess, in some ways, Heat Waves is laying down a marker and saying that these things stem from some place.

CRP: Can you talk about how you found the footage for Heat Waves? I’m curious about how you found these instances in which the West and the US entertainment industry mine places, specifically Latin America, to appropriate the aesthetics of heat and of the tropics.

KC: Oh yeah, of course. I mean, I literally camped out in front of my computer on YouTube for a month and a half. Here's the thing. With Heat Waves, I really try to avoid taking too much of an Anglo-American perspective because so much of the tropics doesn't speak English. But my access to finding this footage is only through English! Essentially, I’m squatting in front of the computer and googling keywords in English. And the problem is that I googled the most cliché of things called “the tropics,” and everything I google about the tropics is incredibly cliché.

In that Middle Eastern text you talked about, the idea is of the tropics as paradise. Right? It's both pestilence and paradise. It's age-old. So at some point you work around the algorithms and figure out how to find stuff that becomes useful, which is why the main way that I worked on Heat Waves was by spending a lot of time. I would like to make it sound like a more profound process but it's just squatting in front of a computer and getting frustrated and googling. It's not the most romantic process, but it's the idea of the tropics as a trope. Because when I google anything about the tropics, half the time, it's going to be a white person in a bathing suit. It really doesn't stray that far from that cliché.

CRP: Yeah, your process reinforces the notion of how inaccessible the tropics are to people and places that are outside of them. And maybe how inaccessible the tropics are to the tropics themselves. When someone is limited to search terms like “the tropics,” what they get are these reductive, stereotypical—

KC: Tropes.

Seni, 2019

Film / Three-channel video, loop duration: 30’38 / 31’01

CRP: Exactly. Of the tropics. But perhaps there's also more that's less visible, that's not unintelligible but is in fact opaque, and that is also present in what we're looking at, which lets us begin to see the realities and consequences of the tropics in these search hits. Let’s see here...

Do you want to talk about Seni and compositional practices? How you remix, recycle, reuse, works in other works?

KC: Oh, yeah.

CRP: I believe Heat Waves has footage from A Tropics Expanded, and also—

KC: Five Stories on Heat has footage from Seni.

CRP: Right. Then there's also Seni: Rescored. Your works are in dialogue not only thematically but compositionally, telling a larger story, one that necessitates fiction to imagine the future, so that history is kind of, what is another "re" word?, replayed as well.

KC: The joke has always been there. If you subscribe to the idea that modernity and colonialism are different sides of the same coin, what's the aesthetic endpoint for modernity? My argument will always be that it is the white cube and its colorless, supremely logical, angular design—

CRP: I wonder if that’s similar or different to Black Square.

KC: Yeah, I think that’s one of the inversions that people try. But for me, if you look at the white cube, then the aesthetic inverse would be the tropical rainforest for its vibrancy, its abundance, its wildness. It's everything that the white cube is not. If you look at the context, the tropical rainforest has historically been the biggest natural obstacle to the colonial project.

The tropical rainforest has been the subject of a lot of artwork as well, but I wasn't interested in that. To talk about Seni, I have to talk about the tropical rainforest as a space for art, just like how the white cube is the space for art. Seni came about from there. It looks into the history of the tropics—in particular, tropical rainfall—and it tries to imagine the history of the first exhibition of Singaporean art in Europe, instead of retelling it in London.

As to how works reappear in other works, I think that also goes back to the fact that I haven't been back to the tropics in two years. There's a certain level of practical, pragmatic—

CRP: That's the tropical resourcefulness that we were talking about earlier…

"For me, if you look at the white cube, then the aesthetic inverse would be the tropical rainforest for its vibrancy, its abundance, its wildness. It's everything that the white cube is not. If you look at the context, the tropical rainforest has historically been the biggest natural obstacle to the colonial project."

Seni, 2019

Film / Three-channel video, loop duration: 30’38 / 31’01

KC: Yes. I would like to think that I still have a little bit of the tropics in me in that sense.

In many ways, the plot of A Tropics Expanded was already spoken about in Five Stories on Heat. I had an idea to make this film but couldn’t, and I had to write an application, so a lot of it was borrowed from there. It’s the unglamorous part about being an artist, which is you spend most of your time doing applications, although I do enjoy writing about what I’m thinking as a byproduct.

There are larger projects that I try to do, and then things in between. And along the way, I have to do other things that form components of the project I want to do.

A Tropics Expanded is supposed to be part of a work called Future Tropics. Five Stories on Heat, A Tropics Expanded, Heat Waves, another piece that I'm making this coming week; they're all works that I had to make before I get to Future Tropics. And in that sense, I find myself similar to filmmakers. I really only make films every two or three years.

Christopher Rey Pérez

Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. He is the author of Gauguin’s Notebook, along with other works. Since 2012, he has edited a nomadic publication in, of, and around Latin America called Dolce Stil Criollo. Currently, he co-chairs the Writing discipline at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.