Jon Tan

Designer, Founding member of the Analog co-operative.

The Cultural Questionnaire.

What’s your favorite line from a movie?

Context in film is everything, and often the best lines are the simplest words, softly spoken, in the moment. However, if I had a favorite it would be, ‘what we do in life echoes in eternity,’ from Maximus in Gladiator.

Which movie do you love but would be embarrassed to talk about in a serious, intellectual conversation?

Any of the countless war movies I love could potentially be inappropriate, but I confess to relishing injecting the prosaic into pseudo-intellectual conversations. In Bruges maybe, or even the director’s cut of Aliens might be particularly good fun.

The tune of the moment?

Of the moment? Hmm… Any of the incredible songs from Helplessness Blues, by Fleet Foxes who stunned me to silence when I saw them at the Eden Project not too long ago. Grown Ocean, Blue Spotted Tail, Montezuma, and Bedouin Dress are marginal stand-outs.

Name a museum where you’d be happy to be locked in for the night.

The Science Museum. No, the V&A. No, the Natural History Museum. Can I be locked in them all? They’re so close together, it seems fair, perhaps with a teleporter to the Forbidden City throw in for good measure!

The three books you’d take with you for a very, very, very long 100% environmentally friendly trip overseas?

• Tolkien’s great epic history, The Silmarillion.
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.
• One hundred years’ history of the Chinese in Singapore, by my great-grandfather, Sir Song Ong Siang.

You can give two “cultural items” (be it a book, a painting, a movie, a record or anything else), one to the person you like the most, one to the person that bores you the most. What would these two items be?

Something positive, optimistic, and uplifting for the one who I found somewhat boring. I find lack of grace, either in criticism, or celebration the most boring of all our human frailties. Perhaps Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series, which are fundamentally optimistic books, and In The Sunshine by Arrested Development, one of the most hopeful songs of all time. I’d probably direct them to the Guardian Eyewitness photography series which I find a salient reminder of how lucky I am, and how incredible our world is. If I was being flippant I’d give them The Chicken Song, by Spitting Image. For those I like the most, the same. Everyone needs a utopian dream, a reminder of their own good fortune, and a bit of silliness now and again. :).

What painting would you steal if you could magically become invisible for a few hours?

Ah, that’s a hard question. I’m not sure I can answer it. Even trying to be light-hearted I can’t imagine I’d ever steal a painting, invisible or not. If I had to pick one it would be Okumura Tōhaku’s incredible screen painting, Pine Trees.

Which artist, alive or not, in any given field, would you love to party with for a wild, wild night?

I’d like to get Salvador Dali and Oliver Reed together for a night out in Barcelona. Surreal and epic, all in one.

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November 25, 2011 at 8:00 am