Brief encounter

Artist Fiona Tan appropriated the Brighton Pavilion for her video installation, opening this month at the RIBA, which replaces George IV’s 100-course banquets with a can of sardines. She talks to Eleanor Young.

Q Why Brighton Pavilion?

A When I was asked to do something in Brighton I found the pavilion, an amazing Chinese Disneyland. It is so over the top and so kitsch there are 679 dragons!

I am half-Chinese myself, though I was born in Indonesia and grew up in Australia. It felt like the building, with its confused cultural identity, had stumbled across my path for a reason.

Q How did you approach it?

A I was worried if I filmed there it could just be like the official guided tour which is linked to history, and George IV’s 100-course meal in the banqueting room. To make it distinct I needed someone living there.

Q What do we see?

A I developed a character who is somehow a mirror copy of the building. He has the same confused identity of east and west. My installation is a sort of day in the life of this old, worn at the edges, derelict gentleman, shifting round from room to room.

We follow the man I call him Henry and get a tour of the rooms as he opens a tin of sardines, wanders into another room. He sleeps in the banquet room, drinks a cup of tea in the morning in the music room.

You hear an experimental voice-over by me, describing possible scenarios for the film. Henry does tai chai and sleeps on the floor. He could be a Chinese/Asian migrant who is lost in the west and can’t go back home. Or maybe he is a well-to-do European who has travelled in the east and these are a hangover of habits picked up there. I don’t give a definitive ending to the film. You leave the installation stuck between east and west; or beyond those ideas.

Q Is the pavilion looking its gorgeous self?

A I filmed the pavilion as if it was a desolate, derelict place, using rooms not open to the public, going up in the attic, taking out the rich furniture or filming so it wasn’t in shot, taking down the guide ropes that show visitors the routes around. You don’t experience it as a museum but as a house with a fuddy duddy man who doesn’t leave the building.

Q Are migrations and upheaval a concern in your work?

A They are a concern of mine personally having moved first from Indonesia to Australia, then to Germany and now Holland. It has certainly informed my work. But this work is less on a nitty gritty level; it is more a parable, a metaphor. I am trying to do the impossible and answer the question, is it possible to imagine a world beyond east and west? Henry is my astronaut. He is in both worlds, in limbo.

Q And did you settle on the pavilion’s identity?

A It is a reminder of how much identity is made up by yourself. The pavilion is mostly John Nash’s idea of what Asia was like. Neither he, nor George IV, ever set foot in Asia. Identities are often complete fabrications.

A Lapse of Memory is showing at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place from 12-30 October. For more information see www.architecture.com