Perfect Forms

Pamela Tan masterfully translates her architectural expertise into extraordinary pieces of art

- Brian Cheong

Blurring the boundary between architecture and art, Pamela Tan has established quite a niche for herself in the realm of public art. “I enjoy it because it allows me to be myself, to be experimental,” she declares. “If the work connects with who you are, there’s a sense of growth on a personal level.”

We’re sitting in Poh Sin Studio, her atelier that is named after her Chinese name. The space is populated with smaller versions of her artworks, some of which—to this art novice at least—recall paper cutouts. But it is a skeletal Nike shoe that catches my eye, a work Tan describes as “a marriage of architecture and sneaker”.

She launches into an explanation on how it came to be, which brought together her understanding of Nike’s designer Tinker Hatfield, his Centre Pompidou inspiration, and how he added a window on sneakers for a peek inside them. “What is the subject? How do you translate the narrative into a design? That’s usually how I approach my work,” she says.

This hyper-sense of curiosity has helped Tan, a Tatler’s Asia’s Most Influential 2021 honouree, to create artworks with an ethereal quality that feels new and exciting. She shot to fame with Eden, a 2019 installation at 163 Retail Park in Mont Kiara, Kuala Lumpur. A heavenly vision in white, it was composed of a light, skeletal structure with pebbled pathways and hanging glass spheres. The installation was an invitation to rediscover how nature could be experienced by magnifying subtle details through organic structures.

Since then, she has gone on to make more headlines, namely with