Shirley Tse

Shirley Tse (born 1968, Hong Kong) is a U.S. contemporary artist based in California. Her art is often installation-based, employing sculpture, photography and/or video that may function as stand-alone works or in relation to one another. She explores conceptual themes including plasticity, multiplicity and multi-dimensional thinking, balancing attention to the physical attributes of raw materials, craft, form and socio-political issues such as global mobility, social negotiation and sustainability. Critic Doug Harvey wrote that Tse has "continually produc[ed] elegant and idiosyncratic artifacts that engage the audience formally, while producing a convincing mash-up of late modernist sculptural concerns and something between identity politics and autobiography."

Tse has exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, the New Museum, M+, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, she was selected to represent Hong Kong in the 58th Venice Biennale, becoming the first woman to present a solo show at the event's Hong Kong pavilion. Her work belongs to the public collections of the New Museum, M+, and Hong Kong Heritage Museum, among others, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. She is on the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

Early life and career Tse was born in 1968 in Hong Kong, the fourth of five children in a working-class family with a history of diasporic labor. Her younger sister, Sara Tse Suk-ting, is a Hong Kong-based artist; in 2010 they had in a joint show, "Parallel Worlds," at Osage Kwun Tong in Hong Kong. Tse initially planned to study philosophy but turned to art during an education abroad program in 1990–91 at University of California, Berkeley. In her first professional decade, she had solo exhibitions at Para/Site (Hong Kong), Murray Guy (New York), Shoshana Wayne Gallery and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (both California), among others. She appeared in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Zealand), Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, New Museum, as well as at the 2002 Biennale of Sydney.

Later exhibitions included solos at Shoshana Wayne (2007–22), the 58th Venice Biennale and M+, Tse has been a faculty member at CalArts since 2001, and was co-director of the Program in Art from 2011–14.

In her early work (roughly 1995–2006), Tse focused on synthetic plastics as a medium, using the ubiquitous, malleable material to interweave contemporary concepts ranging from urban development and 20th-century changeability and mobility to her own bicultural identity as an Asian woman living in the United States. It featured abstract surfaces created by laborious power routing that Doug Harvey described as elegant reliefs recalling "architectural models, elaborate micro-circuitry or Gigeresque blends of flesh and technology"; Its sculptures—described as wry, "wonderfully wacky," —had indeterminate forms that evoked imagined purposes ranging from machine to shelter. The show's title assemblage bore a human heart of carved jade both cradled and caged in a small tower (made of cast replicas of recovered submarine parts) that resembled a booby-trap land mine. For example, in Platform (2010) she crumpled and sewed a world map into a mini mountain, highlighting global connections, family migration histories and the notion of multiple, parallel selves.

In her exhibition inspired by Oscar Wilde's children's tale "The Happy Prince" ("Lift Me Up So I Can See Better," 2016), Tse considered multiple perspectives, hope, sadness and the possibility of change through two quasi-figurative, interrelated groups of handcrafted sculpture. Negotiated Differences was a central work in the shows—a sprawling, creature-like, floor-to-ceiling sculpture of carved wood spindles and 3D-printed joints made of wood, metal and plastic filament that were slotted together like toy-building set pieces with joints made by 3D printing.

Recognition Tse has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2009, a Durfee Foundation grant (2001), and a commission from Capp Street Project in San Francisco in 2002. Tse's work belongs to the public collections of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, M+, New Museum, RISD Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery.