Lisa Tan
National Geographic (Epoch)
February 19 – March 27, 2026

Opening reception will be held on Thursday, February 19 from 6-8 PM.

For the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, Lisa Tan presents an installation of forty framed pieces that comprise National Geographic (Epoch), 2025. Each frame contains two printed images: recto and verso sides of clippings of photographs of mountains, amassed from the artist’s late father’s National Geographic magazine collection of the 1970s and 1980s. We see each mountain’s frontal view and adjacent is the literal and metaphorical other side. Turning each page, traversing from left to right, frame to frame, marks the passage of time and the accumulation of experience.

The piece relies on a shared encounter with vintage popular media, in this case a magazine like National Geographic. In its former ubiquity and semantic force, it can exemplify how we consider and perceive both ideas: nation and geography. Within the magazine’s name exists a paradox. The national, as it is mapped by political forces in relation to given topographies in features such as rivers and the mountain ranges that are as mighty as they are unconcerned with the designation of any border. And, the geographic, which is connected to the deep time of geological record, and yet, since the age of the enlightenment and the onset of romanticism, has been tethered to identifications with landscape. Against this backdrop, geography as landscape, and certainly landscape photography, is an image-idea that functions as both generator and pawn in the game of national identity. Ultimately, the implications of these terms, and the images that cling to them, inform our place in the world.

There is another, more personal and lived side to National Geographic (Epoch), which exists in a free-standing text that accompanies the framed works in variable ways. The text is available at the gallery. In it, the artist tells a story of her father, the National Geographic subscriber. It is set in El Paso, Texas where Tan was raised. The dusty border city’s most pleasing feature being the mountain range that bisects it in two.

National Geographic (Epoch) was featured in last years’ 3 Summers exhibition at Lunds Konsthall, Sweden, an exhibition that considered each of the participating artists’ backgrounds insofar as how their movement, geographically as well as culturally, from one place to another, shaped their respective work.
https://lundskonsthall.se/en/exhibitions/2025/3-somrar-3-summers

For more information on Lisa Tan: https://galleririis.com/artists/73