Chooc Ly Tan is a multi-disciplinary artist, DJ and voyager who works across moving image, DJ sets, radio podcasts and club nights. Her practice sets out to create new visions of reality by subverting or repurposing systems and tools we use to understand the world around us – such as concepts and methodologies from physics, politics and music.
Her recent film commission On The Offbeat (2021) explores those disruptive and productive moments of suspension that surround syncopation, tracing the significance of the offbeat through Vogue Fem, diasporic rhythms, critical theory, and insect behaviour.
Chooc Ly’s moving image practice is complemented by and often merges with her DJing and music outputs as an artist and event producer. She also runs the platform Décalé that puts on evenings of experimental sounds/visuals, in collaboration with cultural producer Anne Duffau. Together they aim to showcase visual artists, music producers and DJs who are disadvantaged by societal norms. Décalé means: 'Being displaced in space and time’. She is an associate editor for Ying Xiang 映象 journal, a research project reflecting on the influence of Asia in contemporary culture. Her work has recently been shown at Kunsthall Oslo, in Norway; CCA/EdUHK in Hong Kong; and Chale Wote Festival in Accra. As a DJ, Chooc Ly performed at Swallow, a queer nightclub in LA; Regenerative Feedback at WORM, Rotterdam; The Living Art Museum, in Reykjavik, Iceland; Queering Now, London; and LAVA LAKE 24H RAVE (livestream).
Talks she’s given include the Sonic Culture programme at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), and Signals: Experiments in Sound at the Tate Modern, London.
She is a Lecturer in Fine Art, currently teaching on the MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths university and the MA Photography programme at The Royal College of Art, in London; she is also a tutor on the BFA programme at The Ruskin School of Art, university of Oxford.
“My first name is pronounced Shock-Lee”.