Fraudulent Secret Understanding [collusion] Erika Tan 1999 miniature sound and light environment

The work consisted of Osawa Tsuyoshi’s Nasubi ‘Gallery’, formally a Japanese milk box which was then augmented with sound, lighting, objects and texts to animate the concepts above.

At face value the piece resembles a miniature Chinese moon-gate, filled with calming bird song and pictures of idyllic settings.... The moon-gate's symbolic function however is to protect its inhabitants from other worldly dangers, thus conjuring up a sense of the sinister and the territorial.

Fraudulent Secret Understanding was both a response to the 'open canvas' of the Nasubi Gallery and its context as part of Cities on the Move. It references the activities and strategies of cultural 'collusion' that diasporic communities consciously or unconsciously use. Responding to the site of Cities on the Move, the work takes a playful approach to the concept of ‘gateways’, cultural access, and the presentation or not of cultural representations.