Continuing on the concept of “Stakeholders” — a solo exhibition representing Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 — Tse wants to bring to attention the biggest stake we all hold as stakeholders is anthropogenic climate change. Her current work contemplates all form of sustainability: our environment, our energy use, our mental health and our economic disparity. Tse has relocated to Lompoc — “stagnant waters, or lagoon” in Purisemeño language by the Chumash people — in search of a model for a sustainable art practice.

Non-human stakeholders of Lompoc — animals, minerals, flower seeds, rocket — enter into her studio. Incorporating shed snake skin, diatomaceous earth, tar and charred wood from wild fire into her sculptures, Tse makes palpable the fragility of our life-world.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hong Kong–born, California–based artist Shirley Tse works in the media of sculpture, installation, photography, and text. She at once deconstructs the world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs models in which differences might come together. To visualize heterogeneity, Tse conflates different scales, fuses the organic with the industrial, moves between the literal and the metaphorical, merges narratives, and collapses the subject and object relationship.

Tse received a Master of Fine Arts degree from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Tse represented Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Tse received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and has been on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts since 2001.