Wu Tsang // Nottingham Contemporary

“ Wu 

Tsang’s installations, performances, sculptures, and videos move fluidly between documentary and fiction... Together these films evoke performative states of impossibility, whether it be through imagined histories, unrecognized languages, or narratives of dispossession.”  -  Nottingham Contemporary     

    

Nottingham Contemporary describes Tsang’s work as ‘moving fluidly between documentary and fiction’ This reads as not only a documentary of Chinese culture and way of life, but also Tsang’s personal documentary of her multicultural background. As an individual of eastern heritage living and learning in the Westernised nation of America. Tsang’s awareness of her native background inherit from her predecessors is evident in the traditional nature of some of her films. 

Her work tackles the notion of the Westernised world having a dramatic impact on the development of Eastern culture as well as having an impact on herself.

As a Transgender woman of American/Chinese heritage, she comments on social identity, personal identity with mixed media; films, installations, photography etc…  Both installation rooms hold eastern and western references. The first room upon entry appeared to embrace a traditional Chinese cultural reference with the traditional nature of the film ‘Duilian’.

The depth of the neon light box installation pieces acts as a reflection of Tsang’s own depth of character, her social and gender identity.

Tsang’s neon light box pieces also bespeak of underground countercultures. Peering over the lightbox, viewers are transported to a scene from Blade Runner or Chinatown after dark. Images of dingy back alleys, women of the night, sex clubs, opium dens are suggested through this mere visual trick.

Tsang’s fetishism photographs portray a sexual taboo that’s akin to her transgenderism, the depth of her sexuality is again brought to the surface. There’s an exoticism in the eroticism that Tsang portrays; is this potentially due to her western American life? The Chinese culture in her heritage is exotic to her upbringing, does this drive a fetishism for Chinese counterculture?  

In the second installation room, the atmosphere seemed more Westernised, it was grounded in a contemporary 21^st century western narrative of a confusion of a sexuality and a sexual consumerist culture that runs alongside this.

“The fist is still up” celebrates defense, fighting for right, also self-assurance. This is almost undermined by the film shown next to it which suggests a dissociated sense of self by allowing the audience to only see the film back to front through a mirror. It can be perceived as quite vulnerable; the characters in the film looked strong yet the dialogue and conventions of display carried a weakness. It highlights that a dissociated sense of self potentially transmitted directly from the artist's own inner emotions. Considering a mirror perhaps allows oneself to discover who they are. To peer through a window to one’s soul to uncover a true sense of self and identity.

2017  Amy Foster