TAN-KA plays on TAN (dialect pronunciation of Chen – Stephen’s last name) and KA (Egyptian hieroglyph depicting “soul” or “spirit” of a person that survives the death of the body) with Stephen’s music settings and singing of Yosasno Akiko’s tankas. Using motion capture to animate male manga characters to make them sing the words of Yosano Akiko, TAN-KA simultaneously highlights the melancholy and heartbreak that imbue Yosano’s and Stephen’s work, as well as brackets and critiques the fetishization of gay Asian males by straight Asian women in their production and consumption of Yaoi characters and media.
At its core, Tan-Ka embodies the tension between presence and absence, asking: how do our creative expressions act as vessels of spirit when the physical self is dispersed, transformed, or constrained? Together, Tan-Ka gestures toward a personal archaeology of self — not as a fixed essence, but as a spectral presence emerging through language, sound, and digital form
By situating the project within interactive interfaces, Tan-Ka challenges conventional boundaries between author and audience, body and code, tradition and innovation. The work does not so much present a fixed narrative as it cultivates a space where memory circulates as sound, image, and gesture — both introspection and homage. An exploration of identity as a signal ever-shifting through the cultural and technological landscapes we inhabit, and a meditation on the ways we encode ourselves into the world.
CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 04/06/2021
