Shirley Tse () (born 1968, Hong Kong) is a U.S. contemporary artist based in California.Simpson, Veronica. "Shirley Tse: Stakeholders – Venice Biennale 2019," Studio International, June 22, 2019. Retrieved July 3, 2024.Zellen, Jody. "Shirley Tse," Artscene, July 2016.Tsui, Enid. "Hong Kong picks first female artist for solo show at Venice Biennale – it's about time," South China Morning Post, June 29, 2018. Retrieved July 2, 2024. 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.Johnson, Ken. "Shirley Tse – Murray Guy," The New York Times, September 29, 2000, p. E32. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Rugoff, Ralph. "Shirley Tse," Artforum, January 2001, p.123. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Kraus, Chris. "Shirley Tse," Artforum, July 5, 2016. Retrieved July 2, 2024. 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.Lam, Steven. "Through Negotiation: A Conversation with Shirley Tse," Sculpture, January/February 2024. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Chen, Cara. "Staking a Claim," The Standard, July 10, 2020.Lai, Ophelia, et al. "Roundtable Review: Shirley Tse's 'Stakes and Holders'," ArtAsiaPacific, September 30, 2020. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Holyoak, Vanessa. "Shirley Tse's Ecology of the Everyday," Hyperallergic, July 27, 2022. Retrieved July 2, 2024. 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."Harvey, Doug. "10 L.A. Artists Whose Work You Probably Don't Know – but Should," Artsy, October 31, 2017. Retrieved July 3, 2024.
Tse has exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1,MoMA PS1. "Shirley Tse," Artists. Retrieved July 2, 2024. the New Museum,New Museum. "Shirley Tse," People. Retrieved July 2, 2024. M+, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston,Cotter, Holland. "Architectural Visions Keep Dreamers Awake," The New York Times, July 12, 2002. Retrieved July 2, 2024. and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "SFMOMA Presents Far-reaching Exploration of Art In Technological Times," October 16, 2000. Retrieved July 3, 2024. 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.Nwangwa, Shirley. "Shirley Tse Will Rep Hong Kong at 2019 Venice Biennale," ARTnews, June 18, 2018. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Her work belongs to the public collections of the New Museum, M+, and Hong Kong Heritage Museum, among others,New Museum. "New Additions to the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection," Exhibitions, 2002. Retrieved July 2, 2024.M+. Shirley Tse, Collection.. Retrieved July 2, 2024.LCSD Museums Collection Search Portal. Pack, Roll, Smoke, Shirley Tse, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, HM2010.13.1. Retrieved July 3, 2024. and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Shirley Tse, Fellows. Retrieved July 2, 2024. She is on the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).California Institute of the Arts. Shirley Tse, Faculty. Retrieved July 2, 2024.
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.Lawrence, Naomi. "Profile: Shirley Tse," Asian Art, March 3, 2012. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Dailey, Jan. "Artist Shirley Tse's models of multi-dimensional thinking," Financial Times, March 22, 2019. Retrieved July 2, 2024. 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.Teh, Yvonne. "Parallel Worlds," South China Morning Post, April 1, 2010.Lee, Edmund. "Matter and Memory," TimeOut (Hong Kong), March/April 2010, p. 54. Tse initially planned to study philosophy but turned to art during an education abroad program in 1990–91 at University of California, Berkeley. She completed a BA in fine arts at Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1993, before moving to Southern California to attend Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where she earned an MFA in 1996.
By the end of her graduate studies, Tse had identified the formal and conceptual motif that would occupy her earlier career: global circulation of cheap plastic consumer goods and packaging.Harvey, Doug. "Shirley Tse," COLA 2009, Los Angeles: Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, 2017, p. 66–73. In her first professional decade, she had solo exhibitions at Para/Site (Hong Kong),Para/Site. "Plastic Works and Prostheses Construction: Works by Shirley Tse and Phoebe Man," Exhibitions, 2000. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Murray Guy (New York),Richard, Frances. "Shirley Tse," Artforum, Summer 2002. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Shoshana Wayne Gallery and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (both California), among others.CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. "Capp Street Project: Shirley Tse," Exhibitions. Retrieved July 2, 2024. She appeared in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario,Art Gallery of Ontario. "Provisional Worlds," Exhibitions. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Zealand),Ayuyao, Michelle V. "Artist Shirley Tse Returns Home With A New Exhibition At M+ Pavilion, West Kowloon Cultural District," Tatler Asia, October 22, 2020. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna,Barilli, Renato. Art Drifts, Bologna, Italy: Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, 2002, p. 27–41, 166–67. New Museum, SFMOMA, and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan),Asian Art Archive. "From My Fingers: Living in the Technological Age | The First International Women's Art Festival in Taiwan," 2003. Retrieved July 2, 2024. as well as at the 2002 Biennale of Sydney.Artmap. "13th Biennale of Sydney 2002," Exhibition, 2002. Retrieved July 2, 2024.
Later exhibitions included solos at Shoshana Wayne (2007–22), the 58th Venice Biennale and M+, and surveys at Kettle's Yard (UK), K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong) and the Pasadena Museum of California Art, among others.Kettle's Yard. "Material Intelligence," 2009. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Heitzman, Lorraine. "Interstitial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art," Art and Cake, April 28, 2017. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Tse has been a faculty member at CalArts since 2001, and was co-director of the Program in Art from 2011–14.
Work and critical reception Tse's working method fuses idea, material and object, bringing diverse correspondences and differences in form, surface and association into play.Dambrot, Shana Nys. "Shirley Tse: 'Sink Like A Submarine' at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Art Ltd, July 2007, p. 18. Critics such as Artforum'''s Ralph Rugoff note in her work a "conceptual agility [and] formal inventiveness" that "collapses all kinds of seemingly contradictory elements": micro and macro, organic and industrial, machined and handmade, subject and object, natural and cultural, literal and metaphorical.Knight, Christopher. "Foam that's packed with allusions," Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2003. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Others have sometimes connected her emphasis on accretion, contingency, handwork and sprawl to the sculptors Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois.Wood, Eve. "Shirley Tse," Artillery, July 2016. Retrieved July 2, 2024.
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. Her subsequent installations and exhibitions shifted to a wider range of materials and have explored the plasticity of ideas and narrative, multi-dimensional thought, social negotiation, democracy and climate.
Early work, 1995–2006 In the latter 1990s, Tse began attracting attention for sculptures exhibited in group shows that she made of plastic grocery bags, bubble-wrap, clear packing tape and molded polystyrene packaging.Harvey, Doug. "Galleria," LA Weekly, April 5, 2000. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Hainley, Bruce. "Bastards of Modernity," Artforum, March 1997, p. 99. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Grabner, Michelle. "Stuff," Frieze, September, p. 106–07. Her work then was divided between such objects—often hand-crafted and staged as modular accumulations—and photographic series. In the latter work, she placed vaguely geometric constructions made from inflated plastic bags and sutured solar blankets in national-park settings and photographed them.Duncan, Michael. "L.A. Confidential," Artnet, April 2000. Retrieved July 2, 2024. Critics suggested the rumpled forms initially appeared comically out of place but gradually came to seem no less "natural" than the surrounding rocks, desert and sky.Godfrey, Mark "Image Structures," Artforum, February 2005, p.147–53. Retrieved July 2, 2024. They further noted the reversal of the relationship between surface and structure in Tse's work, with collapsible materials determining form to generate re-readings of the art-historical legacies of minimalism) or the earthworks of Robert Smithson, for example.Kandel, Susan. "Shirley Tse – Plastic Aphasia," Artext, February–April 2000, p. 44–45.
Tse's first major American solo exhibitions (at the Shoshana Wayne and Murray Guy galleries in 2000) centered on the work Polymathicstyrene (1999–2000), an ice-blue, shelf-like polystyrene structure that ran, waist-high, around the perimeter of gallery spaces reaching 200 feet.Williams, Gregory. "Shirley Tse," Frieze, January 2001. Retrieved July 2, 2024. 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"; New York Times critic Ken Johnson called it "intricately sculptured … into a series of abstract topographical designs that suggest miniature land- or cityscapes, ancient and futuristic. [The] telescoping of space, time, illusion and form is exhilarating."
Tse's exhibition "Polytocous" (2002) featured what Artforum called "proliferating, self-consuming nonpaintings": minimal but painterly, 48" square wall panels of cut, excised, twisted and sutured pieces of pastel polyethylene-vinyl acetate (PEVA) that evoked surrogate skins, prosthetic devices and motherboard circuitry. With Shelf Life (2002), a platform-like structure of 20 enormous blocks of white, high-density packing foam that visitors were encouraged to climb upon, she moved to an environmental scale. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight likened its abstract, micro-macro shape to "a cross between a virus and a space station, a sperm and a sperm whale" and its carved, spare surface to hieroglyphs. In the large-scale, free-standing, plastic "Power Towers" (2004), Tse made her first moves toward overt representational imagery and direct reference to ecological issues.Myers, Holly. "Disposable society," Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2004. Retrieved July 2, 2024.
Later exhibitions and series, 2007–present