Tsai-Ling Tseng is a painter born in Taipei, Taiwan who lives and works between Brooklyn and Taipei. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and her MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Her most recent exhibitions include Drawing Exhibition at AVANT ARTE X WOAW, Hong Kong; Moved Still Lives, at 961 Chung King Road, LA; Cave Canem, Eve Leibe Gallery, London; Minor Feelings, Kapp Kapp Gallery, New York; 36 Paintings, Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY; New Directions 2019, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY; If These Walls Could Talk, AHA Fine Art, NY. She has received several prizes and grants such as Shandaken: Paint School Fellowship in 2020, Mercedes Matter |Ambassador Middendorf Prize in 2019; Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. She most recently received the Anderson Ranch Arts Center Artists-in-Residence Award to attend in 2022.
Tsai-Ling Tseng’s paintings reflect personal observations and encounters transformed through the alchemy of imagination. Using figures with exaggerated yellow skin, a reference to her Taiwanese heritage, Tseng explores self-representation, narratives, emotions, and her identity as an Asian woman.
Tsai-Ling Tseng, Minor Feelings, 2020
Tseng creates a seemingly innocent and bizarre world, challenging the viewers to face the current existing social problems through a sarcastic and humorous lens. On one of her paintings titled Minor Feelings, 2020, Tseng, criticizes consumption by showing a woman eating from a pile of bananas, while a skinny girl behind her begs for food. However, she is also pointing at the characterization of Asian women as passive, obedient, and submissive, subverting the fetishization by illustrating an Asian woman eating a banana with red lipstick and smeared eye make-up. Through symbolic hyperbole, the banana is a direct reference to fellatio.
Tseng builds her paintings with dense layers of oil paint using both palette knives and sanding machines. She uses color to create light, and light’s focal point as a tool to manipulate the viewer’s attention to the glowing objects in her paintings; mostly giving the spotlight to the Asian girl.
Tsai- Ling Tseng, Yellow Girl, 2020
Tsai-Ling Tseng, The Death of Knowledge/ Monkey Brain Table, 2020
Most of the characters in Tseng’s paintings are self-portraits, half- human, half-beasts, because most of the time her imagination is inspired by animal instincts. The Death of Knowledge/ Monkey Brain Table of 2020 is inspired by a regional Chinese tradition of consuming raw animal brains. She depicts an open skull, half-human, half-monkey figure in the center of this painting who is waiting to be served as a dish. It’s a metaphor critiquing the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship, which disturbed mandarin speaking countries’ freedom of information and news. In the figure’s dazed eyes Tseng expresses the helplessness she feels when seeing her country threatened by China, and the cruel damage China does to sovereign/autonomous regions such as Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia.
Tseng 's fascinating paintings also address current socio-political issues and her Taiwanese cultural heritage.
Tsai-Ling Tseng, Paint your Heart Out2020
Tseng was one of the 12 fellows at Paint School, a program by Shandaken Projects, New York in 2020. Presented in the style of a post-graduate fellowship, Paint School is a discourse-based program that brings fellows together with faculty members who are widely recognized as among the most exceptional painters working today, to enrich contemporary painting through peer exchange.
Founded in 2011 by a peer group of artists and art workers, Shandaken Projects emerged “… in response to increasing gentrification in urban crucibles of creative production, increased focus on the marketplace in contemporary art (as the financial sector recovered from the recession of 2008), and the grassroots spirit of Occupy”. *
The organization supports cultural advancement through public programs and artist services. Offering free residency programs, free fellowship program, and commissions and exhibitions, they foster experimentation, and dialogue, creating possibilities for cultural practitioners to forge new pathways in their work and in the world.
Read more about PAINT SCHOOL and all Shandaken programs @ www.shandakenprojects.org
anddd check out Tsai-Ling Tseng’s work @ www.tsailingtseng.com
Instagram: @tsailingtseng
Shandaken Projects text - excerpt from Shandaken Projects website.