Ari Tampubolon & Scanlan Wong

Ari Tampubolon is an arts/worker based in Naarm. Their arts work, spanning across film, writing, and performance, dissects the complicated politics of global cultural soft power. Their work work, spanning across producing and administration, dissects Monday boards and Excel spreadsheets, with a pointed interest in mimicking the Slack ringtone every time it comes through. Scanlan Wong is the alter-ego persona of Ari Tampubolon, conceived as a duonymic portmanteau of, 1) the artist Joe Scanlan’s controversy at the 2014 Whitney Biennial and, 2) the writer Ryan Wong’s subsequent claims to have orchestrated the controversy. Scanlan Wong is a passionate but vague arts worker with many successful high-income side hustles including, but not limited to: acting, modelling, lifestyle vlogging, concert ticket scalping, event hosting, influencing, and gaslighting. Scanlan has shown recent works at Gertrude Glasshouse, Trocadero Projects, and the MoMA.

To douse the occipital lobe in bleach: Trans-auto-theoretic approaches to the gusts of western cultural neo-imperialism blowing east into the horizon A partial fiction in three acts

By Ari Tampubolon & Scanlan Wong — 19 May, 2022

This work has interactive background elements and is best experienced on a desktop. My eyes brighten when I see Ari Tampubolon dancing K-Pop in the gallery. They are wearing a mask underneath a mask, playing a character within a character. I think of how Satan made Death with Sin in Paradise Lost, and wonder if…