A person with dark skin and pink braided hair listening to a track on their headphones, sitting on a rock with mixing table & laptop in front of a lush background with waterfall

Kent ChanWarm Fronts (2021)

Kent Chan, still from Warm Fronts (2021), vierkanaals video met geluid, kleur, 61 min, courtesy the artist

Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in the Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema. He holds particular interest in the tropical imagination, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and the discussion around the legacies of modernity as epistemology par excellence.

Chan is a former resident of the Jan van Eyck Academie (2019/20), the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017/18) and Rupert’s Residency Program (2015). He has held solo presentations at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, the National University Singapore Museum and SCCA-Ljubljana, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Slovenia. His work has been exhibited in venues including the SMBA Amsterdam, EYE Film Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Busan Biennale, Drodesera Festival of Performing Arts and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Warm Fronts (2021)

Four-channel video, 61’ 14’’
8 plexiglass mirrors, 59 x 84 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP

4 flat screens forming a vertical stripe on the wall with 2 speakers. A different DJ is performing on each screen, in front of a tropical background

6 mirrors on the wall of the exhibition space forming 1 rectangular surface, of which 4 in the center with printed text in various bright colors

4 flat screens forming a vertical stripe on the wall with 2 speakers. A DJ is mixing in the middle of the screens, surrounded by satellite images of a planet

Close up of a mirror with printed text in green and blue "Queen. Roar, a river gravity momentarily vertical..."

With the work Warm Fronts, Kent Chan furthers his interest into the past and future relationships between hot weather and art. He especially focuses on music emanating from across the tropics. Tapping into electronic music’s long-held associations as a form of futurist statement, he invited music producers and DJs Kaleekarma (India), Gabber Modus Operandi (Indonesia), Makossiri (Kenya) and Guillerrrmo (Brazil) to create music sets. Each is alike in its desire to evoke a musicality in which climate’s past and future come into sync.

These productions set the stage for Chan’s video installation. Together with a group of posters, designed by Jonathan Castro Alejos and printed on mirrored surfaces, the installation imagines a radical tropical future to come: a sonic and solar alliance built not only upon distanced shared histories, but also upon the potentiality and connectivity of heat. For the artist, the tropics are already the future; the future is heat.

Warm Fronts was presented at Kunstinstituut Melly (17 Dec. 2021 – 20 Mar. 2022) in the context of the Special Project 2020/21.