A Lapse of Memory: Fiona Tan’s Moving Collage of Transcultural (Dis)identification

Abstract

This paper examines Fiona Tan’s 2007 Film—A Lapse of Memory, which creates a moving collage of embodied identification and disidentification across material-discursive boundaries between East and West. The work was inspired by a chance encounter with the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England. Constructed in the Indo-Saracenic style and born of imperial navigation and fantasy, the Royal Pavilion is a hybrid structure, which embodies the allegorical capacity of collage and cannot retrieve an origin with certainty and consensus. Tan’s work was filmed in the exquisite, over-elaborated interior of the building, which is a mixture of Chinoiserie and Mughal-Islamic fashion. Decorated and furnished by British and French artisans who never travelled to East Asia and India, the inside of the building is hardly organic but fabricated, proffering while deferring a clearly identified cultural origin. The abundance of trompe-l’oeil artifice, at times, makes it difficult to discern wall from floor, upright from flat, as well as real from fictive. Tan’s footage engenders no overriding knowledge, but fragmented and manifold articulation of history and cultural tradition that disorients viewers spatially, culturally and conceptually. More importantly, Tan created a tangible, corporeal avatar who inhabits and personifies the Royal Pavilion. The character, named at first as Henry and then as Eng Lee, is a grizzled Caucasian-looking man, who, according to the voice-over, suffers from senile dementia and loses himself in incoherent and fragmentary memories of an ambiguous past straddling East and West. Tan’s camera captures his daily routines, like practicing Tai Chi or Chi Qong and performing the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. The close-ups of his bare feet and crumpled face heighten the physicality and hapticity of Tan’s footage in which Henry or Eng Lee stages bodily grounded navigation, identification and disidentification, making and remaking connections with myriad incommensurable cultural elements in his surroundings. His presence and habitation revive the Royal Pavilion as an allegorical architectural collage that shatters and queers any stable conception or paradigm of East and West. Displayed on a wide screen, the work engenders an affective material environment that compels viewers’ physical, sensory engagement. Viewers are enabled to follow the steps of Henry or Eng Lee across the interiors of the building. Seemingly disconnected narratives and images are also variously associated and assembled to engender their own understandings and interpretations. Tan’s work, in this sense, forges open-ended dialogues and identifications in and with difference without attempting to assimilate or appropriates the experience and thought of others. It facilitates the formation of social relations while avoiding over-identification and the problematic conflation of different subject positions. This paper considers how Tan’s A Lapse of Memory, via digital and filmic manipulation, constitutes a dynamic, cross-cultural collage of queer (dis)identification, which is open to viewers’ embodied perception, apprehension and interpretation intertwined with the slippage of memory and history, provoking critical reflections on the formation of identity and collective relations beyond pre-existing sociocultural origins and established structures of authoritative discourses.