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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 produced 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.
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.
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.
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.
Critic David Pagel described Tse's playful "Quantum Shirley Series" (2007–19) as "a cartoon-style fusion of physics, ethnicity and self-portraiture." The wide-ranging sculpture-installations have employed maps, fabric, music stands, stones, text and video in explorations of multidimensional identity and experience that drew upon quantum theory, the history of colonial trade, and both personal and Chinese diasporic stories.Jahn, Jeff. "First Thursday July 2014 Picks," Portland Art, July 3, 2014. Retrieved July 2, 2024.Knight, Christopher. "Object Lesson at Torrance Art Museum's 'Another Thing Coming'," Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2014. Retrieved July 2, 2024. 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.Chang, Qu. "Shirley Tse," Artforum, December 2020. Retrieved July 2, 2024.
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. She arrayed a series of small, wire-mesh, head-like sculptures with irregular, bulbous glass "eyes" like spectators on bleachers witnessing loose enactments of the story by a set of quirky, totem-like sculptures mounted to self-fashioned stands.
Tse's site-responsive installation for 58th Venice Biennale, "Stakeholders" (2019)—and a significantly reworked version, "Stakes and Holders" at M+ (2020)—centered on themes of accommodation, interdependency, plurality, improvised play and contemporary life in the 21st century. Art Review. "The Venice Questionnaire: Shirley Tse," April 5, 2019. Retrieved July 2, 2024. She produced this work using new methods (woodturning, 3D printing), media (HAM radio) and materials, creating unexpected likenesses and configurations with varied components and ordinary objects.Leung, Winny. "What Is at Stake? A Chat with Shirley Tse," M+ Magazine, April 26, 2019. Retrieved July 2, 2024. 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. Reviews described it as a marriage of difference, old and new, subtraction and addition, which served as a metaphor for cooperation, symbiosis and the entanglements and knots of daily life. Playcourt referenced Tse's childhood memories and colonial histories, exploring negotiation and reclamation through sculptures that used badminton rackets, radio antennas and "shuttlecocks" made of vanilla pods and rubber—both once colonial commodities.
After Tse relocated to Lompoc, CA during the COVID-19 pandemic, she turned more intently to the theme of sustainability, in both an ecological sense (she used no store-bought materials) and economic sense—as a conceptual choice she priced the work based on her studio rental cost, shifting the focus from commodity to the conditions necessary to make art. Her resulting exhibition, "Lompoc Stories" (2022), presented a video and nine sculptures made with materials gleaned from her new environs (which included a space base, oil field and prison) that meld the natural with the human-made: cat fur, snake skin, diatomite, fiber optics, a helmet and a basement window, among other things.Park, Jennie E. "Gallery rounds: Shirley Tse," Artillery, September 28, 2022. Retrieved July 2, 2024. She continued to focus on found materials, sustainability and the concept of "degrowth" in the sculptures and video work of her show, "Portal, Virus, Arctic" (2023).McRae, Elizabeth. "Shirley Tse's Exhibition 'Portal, Virus, Arctic' Now on View at Pasadena City College," 24700, October 23, 2023. Retrieved July 3, 2024.
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