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Sian Fan

Having a background in performance and digital art, Sian Fan explores the relationship between the physical and the digital. Her work often feels like an entwinement of a virtual simulation and the real life world, working with the complexities of the human experience in our increasingly digitised and hyperconnected world. Whilst studying at Central Saint Martins, she received the prestigious Mona Hatoum Scholarship for excellence. She has exhibited internationally with venues including Tate Modern, British Council, and the ICA, as well as producing work with the BBC and Google, and has been featured in i-D magazine and The Guardian.


Seeping Out 7, 2021

59.4 x 84.1 cm

Giclée print on Fine Art Paper

This work includes a certificate of authenticity.

£ 475.00 

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Having a background in performance and digital art, Sian explores the relationship between the physical and the digital. Her work often feels like an entwinement of a virtual simulation and the real life world, working with the complexities of the human experience in our increasingly digitised and hyperconnected world. Whilst studying at Central Saint Martins, she received the prestigious Mona Hatoum Scholarship for excellence. She has exhibited internationally with venues including Tate Modern, British Council, and the ICA, as well as producing work with the BBC and Google, and has been featured in i-D magazine and The Guardian. 







'MY WORK SEEKS TO DISCOVER NEW WAYS FOR US TO COEXIST WITH TECHNOLOGY IN OUR INCREASINGLY DIGITISED AND HYPER-CONNECTED WORLD. MY WORK COMBINES MOVEMENT, THE FEMALE BODY AND TECHNOLOGY TO EXPLORE EMBODIMENT, SPIRITUALITY AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN THE DIGITAL AGE. COMBINING THE PHYSICAL AND THE VIRTUAL THROUGH SCULPTURE, PERFORMANCE, ANIMATION, MOVING IMAGE AND VIRTUAL & AUGMENTED REALITY, I WORK ACROSS MEDIUMS, TO CREATE WORKS THAT HEIGHTEN OUR AWARENESS OF THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING ONLINE'


Seeping Out 7, 2021

59.4 x 84.1 cm

Giclée print on Fine Art Paper

This work includes a certificate of authenticity.

£ 475.00 

View

Meshing together the organic and technological, her Seeping Out series explores the relationship between the physical and the virtual in a 2D form. Feeling like a digital simulation, she makes digital materials physical by glitching natural elements. Capturing jagged glitchy motions, looking as if technology is interrupting reality, her work reflects upon the entangled and co-dependent nature of people’s relationship to the online world. Glitches, connoting error, mystery and the unknowable, appearing in a natural setting feels like the virtual is creeping into reality, heightening our awareness of constantly being online.





The other way around, in this series, she also investigates how computers understand and perceive reality, translating these digital interpretations into a fragmented mixture of abstracted colour and texture. She does so by creating a digital simulation of abstracted hydrangeas and other plants, merging and morphing them together. 

The way the series is produced is a very laborious practice. Sian creates these pieces using a process called photogrammetry, which is a method of 3D scanning objects using photography. She starts by taking lots and lots of photos of a flower or botanic, before using photogrammetric software to stitch the images together, creating a 3D model. This 3D file consists of two elements, the shape and form of the model and the texture and colour.

For Seeping Out, she takes this texture file and digitally deconstructs and reassembles it into a new image. She repeats this process, and then takes these new images into video editing software, using digital transitions to morph one image into another. She takes a new still of this moment, where one image becomes another image; where the two begin to seep and mesh together. These meshed stills are then digitally layered to create the final work, which constitutes the culmination of over 100 layers of digital imagery.


Seeping Out 6, 2021

59.4 x 84.1 cm

Giclée print on Fine Art Paper

This work includes a certificate of authenticity.

£ 475.00 

View

During her BA in Performance and Visual Art - Dance at the University of Brighton, she got interested in combining digital projection with the body and started working with video to replicate the body, creating non-physical performers. After graduating this interest developed into digital media, using 3D animation, photogrammetry and game design to create avatars and objects that she could augment and interrupt reality with. When she discovered VR and AR, she got engrossed in how digital media affects our human experience.



Seeping Out 7, 2021

59.4 x 84.1 cm

Giclée print on Fine Art Paper

This work includes a certificate of authenticity.

£ 475.00 

View

For many Modern artists, what their art was about, boiled down to the human experience. For example, perhaps surprisingly, Mondrian’s highly recognisable white canvas with black strictly vertical and horizontal lines filled with the primary colours – red yellow and blue, reflected his vision of the ideal condition of society. His complete faith in how the machine would enable progress for mankind was backed up by his choice of complete abstraction. 'If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision,' declared the artist Piet Mondrian. 'Art must move not only parallel with human progress but must advance ahead of it.

More and more often, artists today are dealing with the complexities of the human condition in the digital age. Which makes sense. In a rapidly changing world where almost all aspects of life are digitalised, even more since the Coronavirus outbreak, the far-reaching consequences for human existence, for the characteristics and key events that compose the essentials of human existence, are highly relevant issues. 


But before the artists of our time were reflecting upon how tech is infiltrating life as we know it, lots of artists throughout art history devoted themselves to the human condition or things that impact it. Especially after during epochal shifts such as the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the Modern City. In fact, some of art history’s most famous painters explored this very notion. Edward Munch and his influential Scream, and with him, other painters at the end of the 19th century in Europe, were responding to the disruptive nature of the modern city, rapid political changes and the heavily felt consequences for the human mind. The impressionists didn’t only paint water lilies but also captured the anxieties of modern life.

As the turn of the millennium drew near, technology's invasiveness got real and since a decade or so, this disruptive force to the human experience is captivating artists. The reality of what philosophers today are calling a ‘posthuman’, is looming large. One of the many of the results is that the distinction between what’s human and what’s digital has blurred. Or that enormous masses of information about each one of us is collected online. Or that hyper-connection in many cases leads to hyper-alienation. Sian cleverly works upon this by rethinking ways to coexist with technology. By creating a virtual world that sucks us in which heightens our awareness of the experience of being online, while we can stay grounded in physical reality.

This work includes a certificate of authenticity.

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Follow Sian on her instagram and her website.
Portraits taken by Alina zum Hebel (website/ instagram).
Photography courtesy of where’s the frame? and Alina zum Hebel.

This work includes a certificate of authenticity.

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This work includes a certificate of authenticity.
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