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...Meeting Wan is to meet him with people from many walks of life who have been touched by his work and his various personas.
Two interrelated directions propelled his work: the invention of personas that allowed him to implicate and invite himself into other lifestyles, visual systems and procedures; and his ability to multiply the currency of his photographic work both within and outside the art circuit--exemplified by his self-portraits that also functioned as medical illustrations. There is a sense of poignancy here. Taking up Wart's work today, for me, is less an opportunity to promote it or to draw out some new interpretation, than to testify to a certain manner of working and living that was beautiful. His practice continues to fascinate; its unfolding was set in motion by the inner resolve of the man, not the career artist. Wan made his initial splash in the late 70s and early 80s and did not publicly announce anything he did after 1981 as art, even though he continued to photograph subjects that exerted for him a long-standing fascination. When Wan died in 1987, his extensive archive was left open-ended, the ambiguous status of its materials seeming to have exceeded even the broad dichotomy of "art" and "life."
Coming to Wan almost 20 years after his death, my impression of him is sealed by his last self-portrait, presented in the catalogue of the travelling exhibition Theodore Wan, curated by Christine Conley. (1) The portrait is shot in a conventional commercial studio setting, in which Wan, posing with casual dignity, documents the progress of the cancer that killed him. Here we see the contemporary artist completely at ease with the ethos of conventional commercial studio practice.
I came to regard Wan's life and work, including his silence and withdrawal from the art world, as a remarkable project. Surely it is the aspiration of many artists, Wan included, to traverse the aesthetic and ethical boundaries between art and life. But I am glad that Wan also saw no need to list everything he did within this dichotomy. However complex the motivations behind...
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