Looking for love: a monster-mapping

Tan, Kai Syng (2025) Looking for love: a monster-mapping. In, Art, Mobilities and Uncertainty.

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Invited, accepted, in progress. James Baldwin likens the artist to the lover. ‘If I love you, I make you conscious of the things you don’t see’, states the Black queer author-activist. Baldwin’s quote captures my vision as an artist, academic and agitator. I cultivate critical interventions that seek to reveal how art and mobilities can work together to make the hidden or erased visible, and catalyse conversation and action toward change. By destabilising traditional knowledge-formations, and cultivating ‘tentacles’ to connect between distinct ideas, methods and fields, I seek to develop new, liminal spaces that enable knowledge-creation in others, as seen in my efforts to diversify, decolonise and neuroqueer running studies, neurodiversity studies and leadership studies. Love is the subject, method and proposed outcome of my creative research programme Looking for Love, 2024-2029. Through theory-building, embodied and collaborative action research, I seek to diversify, decolonise and neuroqueer how we understand and do leadership as a co-creative mobilities change- and future-making practice. ‘Love’ highlights the role of art and creative practice through non-western, decolonial and intersectional prisms; ‘looking for’ celebrates the origins of the term ‘leadership’ in travelling, struggling and guidance, which I have argued are embodied in marginalised culture workers (for example, Baldwin, hooks, Lorde, Friere et al), while ‘looking’ underpins how visual arts highlights blind-spots within art, mobilities and leadership studies, and the value of entangling both. I use the term ‘monster-mapping’ as a mobilities method of ‘way-finding and re-direction during and beyond crisis’, in order to map together my research pathways so far, align it with discourses on mobilities (creative mobilities, and mobility justice), themes of leadership and the arts, and visualise/envision where this can go for future creative practice/research.

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