Mark Tan - Misaligned Caliper

Mark Tan
Philippine Mahogany, Walnut, Brass
2026
14.25" X 37.25" x 4"

About Mark Tan:

Who has the authority to decide who is a “dirty” citizen? This question lies at the heart of Mark Tan’s new work developed during the residency. A pair of basins hang side by side, connected by a single water line that recalls the racial and hygienic divisions imposed between colonizer and colonized. Together, they ask what it means to build infrastructures of care that simultaneously function as infrastructures of surveillance, classification, and control.

The work draws on Warwick Anderson’s book Colonial Pathologies (2006), which traces how American colonial medicine in the Philippines mobilized hygiene campaigns to construct racial difference. Under the guise of public health, sanitary reform became a technology of colonial governance, regulating access to care while defining who could be considered clean, healthy, and civilized. The installation resonates with a longer theoretical history about discourses of dirt and exclusion. For example, in Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva describes the abject not as something physically unclean but as that which unsettles identity, borders, and systems of classification. As she writes, “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order.” Read through this lens, the designation of certain bodies as dirty has little to do with hygiene and everything to do with maintaining political and social boundaries. Zygmunt Bauman similarly argues in Wasted Lives (2004) that contemporary societies continue to manufacture forms of “human waste,” rendering displaced populations, refugees, and other racialized and marginalized groups as “disposable” by-products of modern systems of governance. Tan’s basins therefore speak not only to a colonial past but to an enduring politics of belonging in which cleanliness becomes a language through which inclusion and exclusion are negotiated.