Kent Chan’s work engages tropical representations and imaginaries dating from the (colonial) past. Originally from Singapore, Chan investigates how historical and contemporary aesthetics of tropicality can be activated to render future tropical realities, beyond our current climates and geographies. Audiovisual materials are remixed in his videos, sonic works, and installations where in the tropics become possible cartographies of the future. The fourchannel video installation Warm Fronts presents musical sets by four DJs each from a different region of the tropics. Chan’s videos and plexiglass posters propose a fictional global tropics in which past and present overlap, evoking images of solar connections while tapping into electronic music’s associations as forms of futurist statements. At SMB12, Warm Fronts turns the unique vertical space of SeMA’s Crystal Gallery into a territory for listening, dancing, imagining radical tropical futures, and connecting to an alliance of heat that bridges climate borders.
