Moses Tan is an educator, photographer, graphic artist and designer with a wealth of experience behind him. He divides his time between teaching and time spent in front of the computer, creating work for exhibition or for a growing clientele. Tan has had a twenty year association with Box Hill TAFE delivering short courses which include “Photoshop for Photographers” and “The Complete Digital SLR Camera Course.” An ardent traveller, Moses has had regular exhibitions of his travel photographs since the early eighties, much of which has also been published in travel journals. These include “An Italian Journey” and “Journey to Jerusalem.” Illustrator is the software that he uses to create complex but timeless images of urban landscapes of here and from abroad.
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Moses Tan © 2010
“‘Of a Time and Place in Australia and Japan’ is a celebration of two great countries, two neighbours, two friends and trading partners, both located on the Pacific Rim. The first of these, I have called home since 1968 when I arrived here as a student. The second, I had the opportunity to visit for the first time in 2008 – hopefully it won’t be the last. However, I must point out that I have had a long-standing love affair with Japan and all things Japanese – my first three exhibitions were of haiku-inspired photographs”
Moses Tan © 2010
“Of a Time and Place” is, in a sense, a collection of “postcards” – albeit, large ones. Like most good postcards, they are a retroactive view of the present. The camera is an instrument par excellence in the search for images pregnant with meaning, and of places that reek of the past. But as Susan Sontag so succinctly puts it, “a way of certifying experience – by converting it into an image, a souvenir – is also a way of refuting it.” In our image-choked world, where a touch of the finger suffices to confer immortality to an experience, I think it is important to slow down and to really see. And when one draws one can claim to really see. The real instrument of my choice is Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based computer program. “Of a Time and Place” pays homage to the great cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo and Kyoto, but it is no mere document of urban life, nor is it a record of famous sights. To borrow a phrase from Peter Quartermaine on Jeffrey Smart, I am interested in “the familiar world in which we have lived for so long, but whose beauty we could not or would not see.” This exhibition owes much to Hiroshige’s monumental “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” Eugene Atget’s old Paris and Berenice Abbott’s changing New York. I hope that my images, like theirs, go beyond documentation, and become poetic utterances of places and time, all given permanence by drawing” – Moses Tan
