All things being equal, the news was especially grim in the days preceding the opening of Fiona Tan's retrospective "Terminology" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Rockets, beatings and murders were being exchanged between Palestinians and Israelis, all the while accompanied by claims and counter-claims to the legitimacy of one narrative of victimhood over another. Just when it seemed that the quota for the collective equivalent of punching yourself in the face had already reached its maximum, a Malaysia Airlines plane flying from from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed, allegedly shot down by Ukrainian militants.

I wondered if this last event might have had particular resonance for Tan, who grew up in Australia and now lives in the Netherlands. However, in her art, and in person, Tan resists preconceptions about identities, and has less-than-positive memories of interviews in which she has been pigeonholed and been asked to reduce her work to simplistic explanations.

"For me it's important that my works are layered, that you can look at them in different ways, that you are not done with them in one go," she said.