Imagining and Imaging Space with Debbie Chan
Debbie Chan is a Singaporean artist whose practice spans text, publication, video, and emails. Her training as a designer informs her investigations into art conventions, through which she reveals and challenges aesthetic and conceptual tropes. For this interview we spoke about collaboration, the critical use of art mediums, and the role of memory and imagination in our perceptions of space.
Sena Cleave: Let's talk about a recent work, Some of All Things. In it, there's this tension from working from lived experience. You have to balance what you want to be public and what you want to remain private.
Debbie Chan: I was working through some difficult experiences at the time, so I tried to imagine how other people might relate to my work. I always think of how I can pull people into an image even if they don't have the same experiences as me, so I try not to be too specific. Humour has been a great tool for this. People are drawn to humour, and it takes some of the pressure off a work from becoming too focused on my own experiences.
SC: You shot a video of yourself packing and unpacking a suitcase in a confined space. Then consecutive frames of that video became four grid images washed in purple. The title is a clever way to point back at the materiality of video. For me, it suggests that each section of the grid represents part of a moving image, and that the gestures captured within these frames also represent parts of a larger process of packing and unpacking. Sometimes we forget that video has material, and that it can be broken into tangible parts.
DC: Videos shot by phone cameras have become mundane. We don't always consider the phone camera 'artistic,' so it's easy to lose our critical approach to it. I like to take materials as they come; I use whatever I have readily available and play around with it. In 2020, I did my own version of mail art, but through email. While you and I were working together on a project where we posed as curators of our own class' critique day, I sent out this email, which copied the format and the aesthetics of SFU's official notices, to our studio's mailing list. But instead of useful information, it detailed rules of use for a room you and I had made up. It developed from the ideas of rejecting art world conventions and resisting the commodification of the art object.
SC: Email is the opposite of a commodity, right? Like video, it's not immaterial, but you can't exactly purchase it either. And your email caused a bit of a stir among the admins of the school. Elspeth Pratt contacted our teacher with security concerns!
DC: She did? I forgot about that!
SC: That was the best part of the project! Your design was super convincing.
DC: I remember for that project we spoke about curation as art. We were playing with the form of the art exhibition, and of our studio space at 611 Alexander Street.
SC: Our invented room was a way of becoming aware of the real spaces we occupy. It's the same gesture as in Some of All Things, where you use the infrastructure available to you so the final piece points back at itself and at the way it was made.
DC: And it was a fun way to force our classmates to collaborate with us! Part of making this fictional room was to draw it into the exhibition map we made for the day of the critique. So we bullied our peers into telling us their work titles weeks ahead of the due date. We had to make sure we didn't accidentally place one of their works on the fake walls in the map.
SC: And on the day of the critique, I think everyone became more aware of the studio, because there was a process of discovering the walls we added into the map.
DC: It wasn't initially clear we had changed anything. For me, it was about how we remember a space. It was important for our exhibition map to be used while standing inside the studio.
SC: Right. Without the space, the map was useless, and without the map, our room wouldn't exist.
DC: This work is site-specific, but maybe not in a conventional sense. Rather than engage with the histories or the material state of 611 Alexander, we made work about art-making and art presentation spaces in general. We broadened our idea of a site not only to include the imaginary, but also to include the conventions of presenting and archiving in art spaces.
SC: And there was also a broader question about a distinction between what we consider to be real and what we think is fake, or imaginary. There was this nice moment where the class decided that we would all crowd inside the room we had created, and the walls started to feel real.
DC: It was like when you're reading a book, and you're able to imagine the scene being described. It's similar to painting an image.
SC: That takes us back to the idea of materiality. We think of pictures and paintings as having a certain tangible form, and our room started to present itself that way. Maybe our imaginations are material things! We recently read for class an interview of Heba Amin by Anthony Downey, who says "an archive is never about the past as such, it is a device for determining how the past will be defined in the future - and to this end, all archives are future-oriented."¹ This seems relevant to the map we made. I think our room changed our memories of the space, and doesn't that change the space itself in some way?
DC: It's funny that we're looking back on it. Maybe this interview shows our project worked! We constructed a room by creating a document about it, and it became embedded into our memories. When we were making the work, we joked that if somehow 611 were destroyed, and all that was left of it was our exhibition map, our room would become part of the history of that building. This authorial potential of documents and archives really excites me. Maybe it comes from my interest in fantasy fiction books. Good stories can make me believe in the reality of its characters and the worlds they inhabit. Once you begin guessing what a character will do next, that's when it becomes very real, and there's so much potential in this space we create in our minds.
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