As Seen 3 (Page 156)
Karen Smith
The true complexity of what to do today in the name of art reaches its end point in the work of a young artist like Tan Tian whose idealism is strong and raw and whose sense of hopelessness at a world in which everything has been done before is equally urgent. As one of the international generation-he studied in the UK – Tan Tian was early exposed to the art world “system” and to a language he invoked in the launch in 2012 of a project titled How I became a contemporary artist.
Using this paradigm as a format to reflect the enormity of this challenge, in 2013 using a typically off-the-cuff contemporary approach, he chose to demonstrate that contemporary art has become a simple construct, or that what too easily pass for contemporary art works can be constructed by following a few simple rules to achieve a certain type and form of art to satisfy the needs of private and public institutions. His approach was to create a formula derived from the more immediate or obvious recurring characteristics in the works of a leading contemporary conceptual artist. These characteristics are defined, extracted and then redeployed as material, formal strands of an artwork that is titled to reveal the names of the artists appropriated: Thea Djordjadze+Mona Hatoum+Franz West or Jessica Jackson Hutchins+Nika Neelova+David Batchelor. It is clever, and fleetingly amusing, because we know it happens in art – “good artists borrow; great artists steal” is the phrase, attributed to Picasso, that is so often used to justify the form. The objects are undeniably attractive, but ultimately, the cleverly cryptic assemblage functions, at best, as a test of contemporary art knowledge. The situation is, however, complex and the problem of having the problem illustrated in the way Tan Tian chose is, aside from being amusing, unable to project the sharper edge of the issue whereby it is reduced to an endgame in itself. As Tan Tian himself understands, art overloaded with artists referenced is devoid of the qualities that make the artists referenced successful, but since the works from an early phase of How I became a contemporary artist, a correlation exists with the overload of information about art and artistic impulses that emerging artists face today.
发光体3 （155页）
凯伦·斯密斯
以艺术之名，我们今天能做些什么？这个问题真正的复杂之处，就像谭天这样的艺术家的作品中得到了解答，他怀有的理想主义既强烈又单纯，由于世上一切都已完成而产生的绝望也同样迫切。作为国际化的一代----他曾在英国学习-----谭天很早就接触到艺术世界的“系统”以及一种他在2012年启动名为“我是如何成为一个当代艺术家”的项目时所借用的语言。
谭天运用这种范式作为反映这一巨大挑战的形式，并在2013年选用一种典型的、即兴的当代方式表达出，当代艺术已成为一个简单的构造，或者说是可以通过遵循一些简单准则就可以构建而成，轻易被视为当代艺术作品，从而产生某种类型和形式的艺术，以满足私人和公共机构的需求。他的手法就是从当代重要观念艺术家的作品中，提取那些更直接、明显、反复出现的特点，创作出一个配方。这些特点得到认定，提取出来然后被重新分配为一件艺术作品的材料或形式线索，作品名称的组成形式泄露了他所借用的艺术家的名字：Thea Djordjadze + Mona Hatoum + Franz West或者Jessica Jackson Hutchins + Nika Neelova + David Batchelor。这一点很聪明，也让人片刻发笑，因为我们知道这发生在艺术当中---“好的艺术家模仿，伟大的艺术家偷取”，此话据说出自毕加索，也常被用来为其形式作辩解。不可否认，这些物品组合很吸引人，但最终只是一个巧妙但意义模糊的集合，顶多充当了一次对当代艺术知识的测验而已。但当下的情境很复杂，而谭天所选择的表述难题的方式，存在一个问题：既无趣又无法反映出难题的尖锐性，只让难题本身沦落为一场残局。正如谭天自己也深知的，这种充斥着艺术参照的艺术，缺乏了所参照的那些艺术家获得成功的品质，不过因为这些作品是“我是如何成为一个当代艺术家的”展览的前期铺垫，与新锐艺术家们现在所面对的艺术以及艺术创作冲动的过多信息之间，存在着一种相互关联。