Meet Xiaobing Fan, artist-in-residence

“‘He’s trouble’, according to security at TOM’s Bar 2022 – and so many others. I come from a country that I personally don’t want to publicly talk about. I’m a Gay man in the closet to my original family, but currently I’m building my own family with two Hungarian boyfriends, a French lover, a Shanghainese daddy, a Master who lives in New York, my ex-girlfriend from back in high school, and a slave who pays all my bills.

“Rumor has it that I have a biological Mexican father and a Japanese mother, but my DNA test result shows I’m 98% Han. I met my future self in Paris in 2019 at the age of thirty, since then I’ve started to believe that everything that will happen in his life has already been written, including my Artist-in-Residence experience at TOM House. That’s probably why I’m ‘the most comfortable artist on arrival (so far)’ as Marc Bellenger, Curator at Tom of Finland Foundation, told me.

“I work with insecurity and uncertainty, I love paradox and contradiction, and I play with randomness and immediacy. I don’t really know what I want to achieve in my ‘career’ and I’m not in a rush to come up with an answer. Upon being asked (so often), ‘What is my medium?’, I answer: ‘I consider my mind as my instrument and everything that is in front of me can be considered as my medium.’

“With my contempt for self-marketing, I refuse to work with plans, and my most often-used sentence in any conversation is ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know, I’m a man of the unknown, let’s keep our fingers crossed and wish me good luck with that.”

 – Xiaobing Fan, 2022

Published: 27th June 2022

Categorised in: News