A digital archive of Asian/Asian American contemporary art history

Tse, Shirley

Other Names: 謝淑妮

Artist Website

Most of Shirley Tse's works are plastic sculptural objects and installations that are informed by the materiality and standardized forms of packaging material. The goal of her art practice, which has been focusing on utilizing packaging technology as a major working strategy, is in expanding the meaning of aesthetic forms which has been restricted to the art objects revealing or echoing inherent humanistic connotations and values. The artist believes that the packaging technology not only informs us how we are produced but also exactly defines our contemporary society which is about moving people and moving goods. Plastics that she has been using as a primary medium of her work has been fascinating the artist with its multiple and paradoxical adaptability to any condition. Overloaded with lots of possible signifieds, it never tries to stick to any situation and produce a law. Norman Bryson wrote of one of her works, "The hollowed-out patterns resonate metaphorically in several directions. In part, they suggest landscape, and the shaping of the earth's surface by geological force (canyons, plains, rift valleys), the patterning also suggests cities, or the infrastructure of cities, as well as electrical circuits, and industrial casting. Taken together these metaphors indicate, perhaps, the whole range of human cultural activity and a certain teeming biosphere. ---Her work deals with concerns that have been important in visual culture for some time--but expressive of a much later historical moment, when questions of simulation and the post-human are no longer driven by panic, but act as starting points, or familiar frameworks." In her review, Susan Kandel praised her: "Tse conjures the mistakes that accrue when desire overwhelms sense, but that doesn't preclude the work from being massively self-confident. Indeed, this artist's fascination for all sorts of aesthetics--blandness and intricacy- -is positively salubrious."

Review by Young Park

Gallery of Selected Works

Artist Uploaded Images