Laurens Tan, 1950–2025
By ANNETTE MEIER
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Portrait of LAURENS TAN. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
On January 20, the Australian multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator Laurens Tan passed away in Las Vegas at the age of 74.
A trailblazing figure in the Asian Australian art world, Tan worked across various mediums, including 3D animation, video, and music. He was best known for his vivid sculptures that interrogate the complexities of language, cultural identity, and capital through working-class and pop culture motifs. During his over four-decade-long career, he lived and worked between Wollongong, Beijing, and Las Vegas.
Tan’s practice was heavily influenced by his connection to Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, often exploring the concepts of “Chineseness” in Australian art and cultural discourse. Born in 1950 in The Hague to parents of Chinese Indonesian descent, Tan spent his early childhood in the Netherlands, then Indonesia and China, before migrating to Australia with his family at 12 years old. Although his father initially discouraged him from pursuing a career in the arts, Tan went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Adelaide’s University of South Australia in 1978. Almost a decade later, he studied at the Hunan Normal University’s School of Architecture in Changsha, southern China. In 1991, he achieved a master’s degree in visual and cultural identity at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
During the mid-2000s contemporary art boom in Beijing, Tan participated in various shows in the city’s 798 Art District. Notable projects include his Babalogic series (2008–18), which was commissioned for the group exhibition “2D/3D Negotiating Visual Languages” at PKM Gallery in 2008. Tan began to garner international attention, and in the following years he exhibited at institutions across China, Canada, the US, Australia, and Japan.
Tan was also an avid curator. His curatorial projects included the exhibitions “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (2000) for Project Contemporary Art Space in Wollongong, and “Arena – A Post Boom Beijing” (2010) for the Sydney-based Hazelhurst Arts Centre.
Tan is survived by his wife Vivian Vidulich, and their children Jacinda and Michael.
Annette Meier is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.
