Helena Tan's exhibition, "Ajar," concluded at Animal House Fine Arts in Brunswick.
Exhibition Details
Tan's photographs reimagine moments from the film Gremlins, depicting the mogwai spawn as fluffy balls before their transformation. These images emphasize the film's kitsch theatrics through custom-built sets, harsh lighting, and specific filters. For example, Fluff but it’s still life (ii) (2026) shows glowing, smoking fluffy balls in a cardboard box.
Tan's background in sculpture is evident in the exhibition's spatial design. The gallery is divided into three sections, accessible through swinging saloon doors titled Midriff (2026), constructed by Tan. The patterns on these doors are sourced from William Halfpenny’s Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste (1755), which provided British interpretations of chinoiserie designs. Tan has transferred Halfpenny’s “A Chinese Double Braid Paling” and “A Chinese Parallelogram” to her saloon doors.
Thematic Exploration
A central theme of "Ajar" is the "fantasy of the Oriental," connected to Gremlins. The film implies Gizmo's Chinese origin, and its narrative later incorporates a "yellow peril" trope as the clones cause chaos. The accidental feeding scene in the film also features Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which used aliens as a Cold War metaphor for Soviet takeover, linking to xenophobia. "Ajar" explores the abstraction amplified by globalism rather than focusing on critiques of cultural appropriation.
Abstraction forms the core of 'Ajar’s' conceptual framework. Halfpenny's designs in Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste exemplify abstraction, reducing "Chineseness" to standardized patterns. The saloon doors also reference the Western cliché, a genre reduced to flat visual symbols that aid its cultural endurance. The exhibition notes how abstraction, seen in chinoiserie's influence on Chippendale furniture and its presence in mass-produced items, ultimately serves capitalism.
Trisha Low's catalogue essay for "Ajar" states that chinoiserie renders Chinese elements generic, making them ubiquitous and unlocatable.
The article discusses artist Helena Tan's hyper-mobility (living in New York, Stockholm, Berlin; born in Cardiff; parents in Melbourne) in relation to the exhibition's theme of abstraction and potentially abstracted national identities.
Video Work
The exhibition features a video work displayed on a bathroom cabinet with two-way mirrors. One video compiles Go-Pro footage from pets. The second video shows the Gremlins film set street, which was repurposed for productions like Smash Mouth’s "All Star" music video and Desperate Housewives' Wisteria Lane. The videos intermittently cut out, reflecting the viewer. Trisha Low's essay notes that cultural abstraction, like chinoiserie, can recirculate and supersede its original referent. Tan's use of mirrors aims to implicate the viewer in the abstraction process.
Artistic Approach
Tan's Gremlins photographs are not exact restagings but combine elements, deliberately performing the reduction and reconfiguration identified in chinoiserie and Western mythology. 'Ajar' examines abstraction as a method for solidifying images into broader culture. The exhibition suggests that essentialization removes complex substance, enabling subjects to navigate time and space more easily.
Increased abstraction can lead to reduced questioning and enhanced survival in culture.