Gerry Tan, born 1960, lives and works in Manila, Philippines
Gerry Tan explores the "work of art in the age mechanical reproduction" questioning sites of meaning and experience through an endless array of multiples reverse-engineered into originals. Appropriation, as something that is borrowed or quoted from its original source that reveals the relationship between the original and the copy, along with notions of ownership and authenticity, is a condition that appears and reappears in Gerry Tan’s work. His paintings are for the most part composed of multiple layers of imagery taken from the world of art, which in itself is a culture of representation, and from mass media, which involves the reproduction and dissemination of images. Tan's subsequent retouching and remixing of visual information in his work gives way to new itinerant meanings that become critical tangents for the further deconstruction of control codes.
Gerardo Tan took his BFA degree in Painting at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and his MFA degree in Painting at the State University of New York at Buffalo on a Fullbright Fellowship grant. A multimedia artist, he works with objects and photo-based installations, artist books, collages and mixed media paintings. His recent collage-based paintings fuse digital prints and paint, probing postmodern concepts of originality and individual style. He has participated in many local and international exhibitions among which are the 1st Melbourne Biennale (1999) and the 2nd Asian Art Show in Fukuoka Museum (1982). He is also a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1988.