Tseng Kwong Chi

Hong Kong–born artist and photographer

• Born: September 6, 1950
• Place of Birth: Hong Kong
• Died: March 10, 1990
• Place of Death: New York, New York

Photographer Tseng Kwong Chi is best known for his large-scale black-and-white portrait collection known as East Meets West, in which the artist is posed in front of historical monuments and sites. Tseng was also an important documentarian of the New York downtown arts scene during the 1980s.

Birth name: Joseph Tseng

Areas of achievement: Art

Early Life

Born Joseph Tseng on September 6, 1950, in Hong Kong, to Ronald and Stella Tseng, Tseng Kwong Chi was the eldest of three children. His younger sister is the dancer-choreographer Muna Tseng, who would later become the head of the Tseng Kwong Chi estate and archives. His youngest sibling is Raymond Kwong-Yen. His parents were Chinese Nationalists who immigrated to Hong Kong in 1949. The family settled in a middle-class white neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1966. The experience of the move would be influential on Tseng’s artistic work in the decades that followed.

Tseng was a child art prodigy with Chinese ink brush painting. Art became a refuge for Tseng during his high school years. He attended the University of British Columbia and Sir George Williams University in Montreal. Although he initially studied physics, he changed his major to art. From 1970 to 1977, Tseng lived in Paris, France, where he trained in painting. Later, he studied photography at the École Superieure d’Arts Graphiques.

As a young man, Tseng was given his father’s 2.25-inch Rolleiflex cameras, which he used in his work until 1985, when he switched to a Hasselbad 2.25-inch camera. His father, an amateur photographer, used to take family photos with the Rolleiflex. The square black-and-white photographs taken by Tseng’s father are referenced in his later work.

In Paris, Tseng became interested in documentary and street photography. In 1978, he moved to New York, living with his sister, Muna, on the Lower East Side, where he struck up a close friendship with the artist Keith Haring and other members of the burgeoning downtown arts scene. Tseng developed his talents in portraiture while simultaneously documenting the downtown scene, photographing many artists, including Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna, and Grace Jones, among others.

Life’s Work

A regular fixture at the Lower East Side’s Mudd Club and Club 57, where he read poetry with Haring, Tseng was also the de facto disc jockey in the Michael Todd Room at the Palladium Nightclub. During the 1980s, Tseng regularly contributed to Kim Hastreiter’s Soho Weekly News and The Paper, as well as the Japanese art magazines Brutus and Bacchus. He also shot color portraits of artists such as Andy Warhol for publications including Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Digest. In 1984, Tseng collaborated with Haring on the exhibition Art in Transit for the opening of Semaphore East Gallery.

Tseng began his series East Meets West, also known as the Expeditionary Series, in 1979 and continued with the project through 1989. A personal, long-term self-portrait project that spanned the world, the series was to become his magnum opus. In these photographs, the artist dons reflective sunglasses and what became known as his signature Mao suit, stepping into the role of the “ambiguous ambassador.” He also often wore an ID badge that read “Tseng Kwong Chi: Visitor/Visiteur” or “SlutForArt.” The suit is, in fact, a Sun Yat-sen suit that the artist found in a Chinese antique shop in Canada. When his parents visited him and his sister and they dined together at Windows on the World, the dress code required a suit. In wearing the Mao suit to the restaurant, Tseng recognized that the maître d’ treated him like a Chinese dignitary. As an artist, the suit allowed Tseng access and made him highly visible, while emphasizing his “foreignness” and embodying the “other.” From 1979 until 1983, the series prominently features Tseng in the foreground of the photographs in front of well-known locations and architectural icons ranging from Disneyland to the World Trade Center and Cape Canaveral. These images recall tourist snapshots.

In his work, Tseng becomes a global wanderer. The camera’s shutter release is often visible in the large-scale black-and-white images, underscoring not only Tseng’s role as auteur and mise-en-scène but also as an outsider to the image. A gay man living during the 1980s, Tseng’s sexual orientation also made him an outsider. The East Meets West photography series grew to include venues in Europe and Canada.

In 1985, Tseng discovered that he had contracted HIV. During this time, the New York arts communities suffered an epidemic of HIV/AIDS cases. Tseng was active in seeking cures for the disease and helping friends who had been affected by its spread.

In 1987, the images in the Expeditionary Series began to include landscapes, which overshadow and dwarf his increasingly sickly body, which at times becomes lost in the photographs. Tseng succumbed to an AIDS-related illness on March 10, 1990. After his death, his sister, Muna, began working to establish his estate and body of work, which includes more than seventy-five thousand images.

Significance

An Asian diasporic artist who lived and worked on multiple continents, Tseng’s work also actively questioned his Asian identity on the global stage and can be understood both within and beyond the Asian American context. His work engaged in investigating the artist’s role in a constantly shifting transnational setting during a time when the limits of the discourse on multiculturalism were just beginning to be pursued. His powerful photography predates such terms as “transculturality,” yet it seems to presuppose its advent. Even decades after his death, Tseng's work remains relevant and inspiring; in 2023, many of his photographs were featured in "Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series," a Hong Kong exhibition of many of the artist's most famous photos.

Bibliography

Bailey, Stephanie. "Tseng Kwong Chi." Artforum, 24 Sept. 2024, www.artforum.com/events/tseng-kwong-chi-209487. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Machida, Margo. “Out of Asia: Negotiating Asian Identities in America.” Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art. New York: New Press, 1994. 96. Print. Catalog for a 1994 exhibit at Asia Society.

Scharf, Kenny, at al. Tseng Kwong Chi: Self Portraits, 1979–1989. New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2008. Print.

Schueller, Malini Johar. Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship. Albany: State University of New York P, 2009. Print.