Cirrus@Austlit

‘If something is repeated often enough, then it crystallises itself as truth in the cultural consciousness. It took me a long time to unlearn and discard the mythic images that the old country was trying to sell to me. I’m sure there are still residual traces. See how I dare not invoke its name.’

'An exploration of identity across global and digital territories, Cher Tan’s essays of bend and break boundaries to resist easy categorisation.

'Peripathetic contains work that is self-reflexive, wry, intelligent and restless. It includes a lyric essay on the tropes surrounding the cultural signifiers of ‘normal’ vs ‘weird’; an extended critique on the tensions the term ‘authenticity’ presents; a meditation on the artist as influencer; the existential tensions that are connected to ‘performance’ in everyday life; and an autofictive essay on Tan’s 20-year history of ‘unskilled’ labour that prises apart contemporary ideas of class and capital.

'The collection is as non-linear as Tan’s work and life: traversing subjects from technology to late capitalism, interrogating power, borders and capital while considering the ever-evolving facets of identity, self, and culture in a hyper-real world. In Peripathetic, Tan has created a collection of essays that blends cultural criticism, experimental writing, autotheory, (inter)net writing and literary memoir, bringing us new ways of viewing familiar artistic territory.' (Publication summary)