Tseng Kwong Chi

Tseng Kwong Chi, known as Joseph Tseng prior to his professional career (Chinese: ; September 6, 1950 – March 10, 1990), was a Hong Kong-born American photographer who was active in the East Village

Tseng's most famous body of work is his more than 100 self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the "Expeditionary Series". In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his "Mao suit" (also called a Zhongshan suit) and sunglasses (dubbed a "wickedly surrealistic persona"

The first photograph was taken in Provincetown, Massachusetts; other sites included the Statue of Liberty, the United States Capitol; Cape Canaveral, Disneyland, throughout the 1980s working on murals, installations and the subway. In 1984, his photographs were shown with Haring's work at the opening of the Semaphore Gallery East location in a show titled "Art in Transit". Tseng photographed the first Concorde landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, on October 19, 1977, from the tarmac. Tseng has also been included in the Asian American Arts Centre's digital archive. In 2025, the George Eastman Museum purchased Tseng's Moral Majority (1981) with funds from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.

Life Tseng's father was a Kuomintang officer who fled Shanghai in 1949 when the Communists won the Chinese Civil War. Tseng was born in British Hong Kong the following year but switched to photography after one year,

Tseng died of AIDS-related illness in 1990, and was survived by his companion of seven years, Robert-Kristoffer Haynes, who remains a resident of New York City and serves as Registrar at Paula Cooper Gallery.

Books

Chi, Tseng Kwong & Richard Martin, Tseng Kwong Chi (Kyoto Shoin International Co., Ltd / Art Random, Kyoto, Japan, 1990) Tseng Kwong Chi, Ambiguous Ambassador (Nazraeli Press, 2005) Cameron, Dan & Wei, Lily, Tseng Kwong Chi: Self Portraits 1979-1989 (Ben Brown Fine Arts & Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2008) Kwong Chi Tseng, Tseng Kwong Chi, Citizen of the World (Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong, 2014) Chi, Tseng Kwong, Amy Brandt, Alexandra Chang, Lynn Gumpert, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Muna Tseng, Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing For the Camera (Chrysler Museum of Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York University in association with Lyons Artbooks, 2015)