Kent Chan: Warm Fronts

Kent Chan is an artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice revolves around the tropical imaginary. Based between Amsterdam and Singapore, his artworks explore the different contexts, politics, and aesthetics of heat. The practices of other creatives often form the locus of his works, as is true of his latest installation presented here, Warm Fronts.

For this exhibition, Chan furthers his interest into the past and future relationships between heat and art. He especially focuses on music emanating from across the tropics, inviting music producers and DJs in India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Brazil to create a set. Tapping into electronic music’s long-held associations as forms of futurist statement, each is alike in its desire to evoke a musicality in which climate’s past and future come into sync.

These music sets shape Chan’s video installation, which, together with a series of posters by the artist designed by Jonathan Castro Alejos, imagines a radical tropical future to come. A sonic and solar alliance built not only upon their distanced shared histories, but the potentiality and connectivity of heat. For the artist, the tropics is already future; the future is heat.

The work exhibited will be donated to the Dutch national art collection, the Rijkscollectie.