Jack Ky Tan

Meet artist Jack Ky Tan, who will be making large coiled 'commemorative disaster pots' with porcelain paper clay during his Ceramics Studio residency. ⁠ ⁠ Jack Ky Tan is the final of three resident artists working in the gallery during the Break the Mould exhibition. Visitors are invited to witness making in action and talk to the ceramicists about their practice.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ Tuesday 19 – Thursday 21 May ⁠ ⁠ Friday 24 – Sunday 26 July ⁠ Tuesday 18 – Wednesday 19 Aug ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ Plan your visit (link in bio.)⁠ ⁠ ⁠ @jackkytan @jerwood_foundation @freelandsfoundation @_ai_gallery @aceagrams @visit_birmingham @brindleylife ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ #IkonGallery #ArtistResidency #Clay #Birmingham#ContemporaryArt⁠

COMING SOON 📅 Mandy Merzaban Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) 28 April – 5 September 2026 Opening later this month in our Mezzanine Gallery, we are excited to announce a new exhibition by Mandy Merzaban (@mmerzaban ). Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) is a multimedia poetry project about how Orientalism, the West’s destructive imaginary of the ‘East’, changes form over time: from masking itself in contemporary culture and institutions within neoliberalism to love and longing within diasporic experience. The project unravels within the magnetic aura and altar of 🔮 K‑pop, choreography, and sonic artifacts using BTS's (방탄소년단) Fake Love (2018) as a kinetic cypher, or key, for the project's poems and archival research. Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) follows Merzaban's role as John Hansard Gallery's Poet in Residence, as part of @jackkytan 's guest curatorship. Link in bio for more 🔗 Credits: Artist: Mandy Merzaban Sound: Tzekin @tamtzekin Poetry editor: Kate Briggs Images: Archival materials: Design for the game of Snakes and Ladders, Nagpur, India c. 1800, gouache on paper mounted on cloth by Trivenkatacharya, a Maharashtra artist; Pages from International Congress of Orientalists menu, 1889. Engraving of ancient city of Anarajapura in Some Remarks upon the Ancient City of Anarájapura or Anarádhepura, and the Hill Temple of Mehentélé, in the Island of Ceylon, published in the 1834 Captain I. J. Clapman. Credits: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Credited to The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. All images are original artworks created using transformed elements from BTS performances, and fan made media. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the original rights holders. #JHGMerzaban #MandyMerzaban #Exhibition #Southampton #ComingSoon

Invitation to Join – AREVA Writers’ Room II Public Sharing The Writers’ Room led by @jackkytan and @cvanlondon develops collaborative processes grounded in shared values of reflection, care, and critical exchange. The cohort has explored writing as a tool for connection, sense-making, and resistance, foregrounding generosity, peer support, and trust. A collective intention to co-produce common policies as open-access resources will be further developed and supported by CVAN London. We extend our thanks to @camdenartcentre for hosting the programme for a second year, and to all colleagues and organisations who participated. A public online sharing event will take place on 4 March, 11am–1pm, offering an opportunity to encounter the work and reflections emerging from the Writers’ Room. Register to attend via link in bio #VisualArts #ArtsNetwork #ArtistDevelopment #CulturalSector #CreativeCommunities #CVANLondon #CamdenArtsCentre

An update from the January 2026 meeting of our emerging LEAVE THE WEST? group. We are sharing some learnings here from that meeting and an invitation to join our next meeting if any of this resonates. While we are keeping critical and ethical questions live in our discussions, we are also moving on to much more practical knowledge. DM to join the discussion and our growing mutual aid network.

This March to Sept, I will be exhibiting my work 'A Ceremony for the Unborn Future', a tryptic of ceramic vases encapsulating three Daoist cosmological principles of Wuji (the pre-material formless state of the universe), Taiji (the moving force behind reality) and Wanwu (the manifested myriad universe). Originally commissioned by @themechatroniclibrary & @photoworks_uk . Along with @halimacassell and @roodhissou , I will also be undertaking a making residency in the gallery exploring the tradition of commemorative and disaster ceramics as well as Gossware, using roughly handbuilt porcelain vessels and ceramic transfers. I will focus on documenting legally significant (to me!) political events of the day. This new body of work also begins a process of thinking about very long timeframes (or 'yugas' to reference Hindu cosmology) for artwork, where I am making work that might be excavated by alien archeologists in a distant post-human world. I will (very likely) be in residence 18-22 May, 22-26 June, 13-17 July. Come say hi if you are in Birmingham! Break The Mould exhibition and residency is curated by @daphneychu and Will Kew. --- @ikongallery Ikon presents Break the Mould, the final exhibition in a trilogy exploring craft, art school pedagogies and contemporary art practice. This show focuses on ceramics, positioning clay as a site of experimentation. ⁠ ⁠ The exhibition includes leading ceramicists and contemporary artists who challenge traditional boundaries of craft. Resident artists Jack Ky Tan, Halima Cassell and Roo Dhissou will work in the gallery during the exhibition, alongside artworks by Kara Chin, Mark Essen and Laurie Ramsell. The exhibition also hosts two Birmingham ceramics workshops; Sundragon Community Pottery and Modern Clay. ⁠ ⁠ Open 25 March – 6 September 2026. Free entry, donations welcome. Exhibition Launch: Tuesday 24 March, 5-7pm. All welcome.⁠ ⁠ This exhibition is generously supported by Jerwood Foundation, Freelands Foundation and ai. gallery. ⁠ #Clay #Pottery #Ceramics #Exhibition #ContemporaryArt Craft⁠ ⁠

RESCHEDULED What Can(’t) an Arts Organisation Do? with Jack Ky Tan Session 1: 10am - 11.45am Session 2: 12pm - 1.45pm 10 Feb, 2026 Free + Online Sign up link in our linktree! If you have any issues signing up, please get in touch 📨[email protected]📨 🚨Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to reschedule Session 1, which will now take place on February 10th, ahead of Session 2 which will run as previously advertised later the same day. If you have already registered, there is no need to re-register and you should have received information for joining the sessions already. If you haven’t, please get in touch🚨 💭Course Information💭 A new course exploring what current arts organisations and institutions in Scotland make possible and what they prohibit. Multiple intersecting crises (extreme wealth inequality, resurgent fascism, militarism and imperialism, climate collapse and genocide in Palestine, to name only some of the most urgent) are challenging the traditional purposes and practices of Scottish contemporary arts organisations and institutions of all sizes and forms. These crises are both the cause of massive transformations in society and require massive societal transformation in order to address them and the injustices they produce. The art sector is no less exempt from this need for transformation than any other part of society, and the role organisations and institutions play in these transformations is a key site of political conflict in our sector. In light of this urgent need for transformation, this workshop series aims to provide a space for participants to index, through reflection on their own experience, that which arts organisations and institutions of various kinds currently enable and make possible, and that which they are incapable of or actively prohibit. In the first session we will focus on what organisations can do, with an eye to what they may be capable of, while the second will focus on what they can’t do, as well as the possibilities that lie outside of them.

UPDATE!: 1st session now postponed to 10 Feb at 10am and is focussed on what organisations CAN DO & strategies that they can adopt. We ask what can organisations achieve politically within their remit, what tools & agencies are possible within these limitations? The 2nd session on 10 Feb will acknowledge what we CAN'T DO, but to learn to see these as a STARTING POINT to manifest different futures. #aporiaasmethod Come join me! ---- What Can(’t) an Arts Organisation Do? With Jack Ky Tan 12pm - 1.45pm, 27 Jan & 10 Feb Zoom A new course exploring what current arts organisations and institutions in Scotland make possible and what they prohibit. Multiple intersecting crises (extreme wealth inequality, resurgent fascism, militarism and imperialism, climate collapse and genocide in Palestine, to name only some of the most urgent) are challenging the traditional purposes and practices of Scottish contemporary arts organisations and institutions of all sizes and forms. These crises are both the cause of massive transformations in society and require massive societal transformation in order to address them and the injustices they produce. The art sector is no less exempt from this need for transformation than any other part of society, and the role organisations and institutions play in these transformations is a key site of political conflict in our sector. In light of this urgent need for transformation, this workshop series aims to provide a space for participants to index, through reflection on their own experience, that which arts organisations and institutions of various kinds currently enable and make possible, and that which they are incapable of or actively prohibit. In the first session we will focus on what organisations can do, with an eye to what they may be capable of, while the second will focus on what they can’t do, as well as the possibilities that lie outside of them. This course will be most useful to participants with direct experience of working within, around or for arts institutions and organisations, or with direct experience working toward their transformation away from current norms. Sign up via bio link @artistsunion.scot .

image: Keith Murray (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Last month (Oct 2025) @mmerzaban and @jackkytan made an open invitation to anyone who wanted to discuss visa precarity, the hostile environment and their impact on artistic practice in the UK. We asked IS IT TIME TO LEAVE THE WEST? We had honest conversation and many complex and difficult issues arose which we still need to think through together. But there was also hope. Hope for regeneration, resistance and resettlement whether we stay or go. And perhaps more excitingly, a vision for a new diaspora of creatives. The group is now offering some notes and learnings from our knowledge exchange, and an invitation to join the ongoing conversation. Our next meeting will be on 17 Jan 2026, 6-8pm (GMT). AGENDA SO FAR (updated 28 Nov 2025): 1. issues around leaving but not returning to birth or native lands. ie. double/triple displacement. 2. Knowledge share about which counties to go to, pros/cons and why. 3. Using a different platform like Discord to facilitate better resource sharing and managing time differences.

Documentation of my recent show (Sep 2025) at the @photoworks_uk & Royal Geographical Society's SUMMIT PHOTO. It was part of an exhibition curated by Helen Starr called 'From Below So Above' which explores our entangled relationship with the natural world through mythology, ritual, and speculative ecology. It was an interesting process for me to explore making ceramics with AI, only to find that AI was actually quite rubbish at making the images/decals I needed. Even though I'm really basic at photoshop, in the end I just used AI as a visualising tool, and I still had to hand draw to get the granularity, detail and, more importantly, the presence or (human) aura that I needed. But much more interesting was my conversation with Copilot and DeepSeek about the Dao, AI consciousness and whether LLMs are part of the '10,000 Things'. Whether this artwork and conversations were part of the ebb and flow, rise and fall, give and take of the Dao. This work was also a turning point for me as it was a first small public step in reconfiguring my art practice itself: away from the Enlightenment production (and expectation) of individual genius towards understanding the individual (and artist) as an intersection of communality or as a 'nodal mind'; away from creating objects as neoliberal material or capitalist visuality towards creation as flow and fulfilment (of a uni/multiversal ordering, ie. the Dao); away from (short) career and legacy human lifespans towards works of art as building yet-to-be imagined worlds and adding to the (long) deathspan of archeological time. It was a pleasure and relief* to be held by a curator (@themechatroniclibrary ) who understands the idea of making contemporary art within a different cosmology and metaphysics, who can hold the contradictions of this and also be able to extrapolate what an artist brings. *Relief because I'm always gaslighting myself thinking 'this idea is too crazy or stupid' to put out there! Photos of installation by Ruba Zabikowska. Panel discussion photos are slides by Helen Starr summarising A CEREMONY FOR THE UNBORN FUTURE. Group photo includes some of my favourite people! @clembedos @kinnarisaraiya

I was hesitant at first to add this Polycrisis Rider to my general access and collaboration rider because it felt like I was reducing the kinds of organisations I am willing to work with. But I think I am. Because after a year so far of being in the orbit of environmental and earth activists in the Joseph Rowntree 'Emerging Futures' programme, my concerns are now beyond artists' rights and arts sector advocacy. There is an urgent poly-, multi-, meta-crisis happening that we are all entangled with and we need to invent new ways to tackle it together. As art workers and art organisations, we may not be able to address the polycrisis economically or scientifically. But we have special expertise in interdisciplinarity, empathy, cultural dynamics, critical thinking, visual and material philosophy, and most importantly our highly advanced ability to demonstrate and realise imagined futures. And at a gut reaction level, as a practitioner that has a live art and performance background, projects that rehearse dead or dying systems are simply boring to me. While projects that create new undiscovered structures and realities are alive and very exciting! Link in bio to read my new Polycrisis Rider within my Collaboration Rider. Background image: 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View' art installation by Cornelia Parker. This work is made up of reassembled pieces of a garden shed and contents that was detonated and exploded by the British Army in collaboration with the artist.