Create! Magazine is excited to highlight the work of artist Tsai-Ling Tseng, who lives and works between Brooklyn and Taipei. Tseng received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Cave Canem, curated by Lauren Powell, Eve Leibe Gallery, London, UK; Minor Feelings, Kapp Kapp Gallery, New York; 36 Paintings, Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY; New Directions 2019, curated by Akili Tommasino, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY; If These Walls Could Talk, AHA Fine Art, New York; EXPO Chicago; and ASYAAF (Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival) in Seoul. She has received grants and residencies, most recently receiving an Anderson Ranch Arts Center Artists-in-Residence Award in 2022; Shandaken: Paint School Fellowship in 2020; the Mercedes Matter |Ambassador Middendorf Prize, selected by Nichelle Beauchene, Christine Berry, Steven Kasher, and Issac Lyles in 2019; as well as the Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.

Artist Statement:

My inspiration often comes from daily life experience. For me, composition means finding angles and structures for my narrative. Before jumping into oil paint, I make a lot of sketches for a specific idea that I want to convey. When I find the most suitable perspective, I then start to figure out the space around my characters. Goya’s prints influence me a lot on building a rigorous composition to activate my characters in a believable imaginative surrounding. Most of the characters in my paintings are extensions of my self-portraits. They often seem half-human, half-beast because a lot of the time my imagination is inspired by animal instincts. Textures grow organically when I paint. I rework the relationships between the characters and the space. The history of reworking slowly becomes a part of painting itself— creating layers of viscosity and texture. I use palette knives and a sanding machine to take down some extra build, and rebuild sections to fit my visual taste. In my recent work, I intentionally chose neon yellow or lemon lemon as the skin color of my main female self-portrait characters in order to highlight that Asian people are often called Yellow People. I use colors as tools to create lights in my paintings. Yellow is the color of light. Light is the focal point for a majority of viewers. I want to use this advantage to manipulate the viewer’s attention to the glowing objects in my paintings, such as to an Asian girl that people would usually neglect. The most difficult and fun challenge in my practice is to combine my imagination with personal observations and encounters freely and creatively, in order to create a seemingly innocent and bizarre world. My goal is to challenge the viewers to face the currently existing social problems through a sarcastic and humorous lens.