The Impossible Self-Portrait: Translation, Transmogrification, Transmediality

Abstract: Combining an artist's interview with a co-authored critical essay, this article is conversational and citational, tacking between research and practice to develop an experimental textual form. We see the intermedial overlapping of artistic practice and scholarly research as resting on language, and as testing of translation. Language and translation have been recurring concerns in the work of artist-scholar Tan Zi Hao, who, in this article, is sometimes "he" and sometimes "me", articulating the impossibility of a portrait while playfully invoking the genre of autotheory. We discuss a select body of work from both an inside and outside perspective, thinking with and thinking within, as well as thinking about and thinking alongside. Questions considered include: Can translation be a radical event? Can we be with each other without expecting mutual understanding? Can the posthuman teach us about the politics of attention and the importance of inconvenience? Centring notions of translation, transmogrification and transmediality, the article reveals how language strips us naked, and tears the tongue from the body. If the tongue is a ready metaphor or metonym for language, then what might the body stand in for or represent?