Jamie Tan You Kean

b. 1990, Singapore

The mesmerising paintings by Jamie Tan are an exploration of colour, but also lightly and evocatively offer a treatise of that most fundamental aspect of art and painting. In a breezy way, they suggest a captivating way of interacting with abstract painting.

In Jamie’s practice, he is interested in the relativity of colour as visual perception and subjective experience shaped by cultural preferences and interpretations. In the summary of his research, colour exists in a transitional space between our subjective perception and the objective world. The experience of colour thus is never a fixed entity because each individual has his or her own memory and perspectives in their relationship to colour; while at the same time, colour in the objective world is always fluctuating depending on internal and external physical conditions.

Colour can appear as a source that registers accordingly and encompasses differences; therefore one’s own sense of colour is the result when these experiences merge. In Jamie’s works, he investigates colour as a sensation – a physical stimulus, a phantom-like force and an aspect of interaction that one can have with painting. He wants to demonstrate that our colour vision is not always stable; direct experience of colour can sometimes become ‘indirect’ and its transparency is not always so much ‘transparent’. By exploring colour as sensation, Jamie uses it as a vehicle to provoke self-awareness of how colour may not be as simple as it seems to be.

Jamie describes the colour as momentarily invisible, a force waiting to be activated in our visible world where it embeds itself into our senses. Colour thus lingers in a state of latency, existing within and channelling through a transitional space between our subjective experience and the objective world, inherently shaping the relationship we have with colour.

Jamie explores colour as an aspect of interaction that one can have with abstract painting. He highlights its unique character in affecting its surroundings, as well as how it can influence our feelings at any given time and space. He delves deeper into the notion of colour as a sensation; an intangible force that can be arrested and brought to the fore. He touches on the pleasure-driven process, akin to a meditation in which he accumulates and organises colour as pockets of energy on the surface, all while investigating its limitless potential.

Jamie Tan who was born in 1990 is a Singaporean based artist. He graduated from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, in partnership with the Goldsmiths University of London with a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts, in 2017. With two hugely successful solos in both TAKSU Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in 2019 and 2018, he has exhibited in many places, including Tokyo, Japan in 2016.