Lecture: Shirley Tse

From Plastic to Plasticity; From Multiplicity to Negotiation 

 Shirley Tse will share the trajectory of her practice in the last 20 years that leads to her solo presentation “Stakeholders” at the Hong Kong Pavilion for this year’s Venice Biennale. She is the first woman to present a solo show in the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Biennale. 

 Tse has dedicated her practice to visualizing heterogeneity through sculpture, installation, photography, and text.  From presenting differences on the same plane, to integrating them into a whole through negotiation, strategies are as various as putting competing aesthetics under the same roof, examining the semiotics of plastics, calling attention to the interstitial, expanding the language of movement, conflating scales, destabilizing categories, using found objects as suspension of subjectivity and researching concurrent narratives. 

 Tse received her Bachelor of Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Fine Arts Department and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Art Center College of Art and Design.  

 Tse’s work has been exhibited worldwide at venues including the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, California; Osage, Kwun Tong, Hong Kong; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, United Kingdom; ARCO Madrid, Spain; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Capp Street Project, San Francisco, California; Palazzo dell’Arengo, Rimini, Italy; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; The Biennale Ceara America, Brazil; MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, New York; The New Museum, New York; The Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; TENT, Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Para Site, Hong Kong; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand; and many others. 

Sponsored by the Sculpture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. 

All lectures are free and held in deSalle Auditorium at Cranbrook Art Museum.