Lurve Me Now

In Lurve Me Now (1999), Tan turns the Barbie doll into a provocative fictional vehicle, reframing an American icon through the artist’s research into the doll’s origins and the cultural fantasies it performs. With wit and defiance, the work answers its own mischievous question, what do Barbies fantasize about, and refuses the sanitized script of “sugar and spice.” The result is a destabilising image that makes the familiar figure newly strange.