What Is at Stake? A Chat with Shirley Tse
Sculptor Shirley Tse. Courtesy of M+, Hong Kong and the artist. Photo: Dan Leung
With the 58th Venice Biennale on the horizon, Associate Editor Winny Leung speaks to artist Shirley Tse about her path to becoming an artist, how she chooses her medium, and the focus of her Biennale exhibition, Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice.
‘Not long into his career, pianist Herbie Hancock performed with jazz giant Miles Davis. In the middle of the performance, out of sheer nerves, he hit the wrong chord. Just as he was struck with worry, he heard Davis improvise with it and play a different melody. For Davis at this moment, there was no such thing as “wrong”; he just responded to and interacted with the music.’ Shirley Tse tells this story with profound excitement.
Negotiated Differences (detail), 2019. Carved wood, 3D-printed forms in wood, metal, and plastic. Courtesy of Shirley Tse. Commissioned by M+, 2019. Photo: Joshua White
A lover of jazz, Tse has been particularly influenced by its improvisational nature, and her own creative work shares this same ‘go with the flow’ nature. Part of her Biennale exhibition, for example, is a new large-scale installation entitled Negotiated Differences, comprised of several wooden forms fitted together with 3D-printed joints. The parts are staggered in shape, some seemingly broken, revealing printed layers—the results of printing errors. ‘Sometimes the “mistakes” actually produced very interesting shapes.’
In a way, it was also ‘by mistake’ that Tse became an artist in the first place. A graduate of the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, she had originally planned to study business management for her career prospects, but her A-levels didn’t go as planned and she decided to use Fine Arts to get in and then transfer. ‘Who could have known that after studying art for a year and learning a bit about art history I would do a full 180° and just completely lose interest in business?’ She went on to continue studying art in Hong Kong, and then in the United States, eventually becoming the sculptor and representative of Hong Kong she is today.
The Impermanence of Working with Plastics
Left: Green Head, 2016. Glass, cast resin, and aluminium stand. Courtesy of Shirley Tse. Photo: j.schwartz; Right: Optic Nerves, 2016. Plastic sheet and metal stand. Courtesy of Shirley Tse and Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Photo: Gene Ogami
For years now, Tse has primarily worked with plastics, but this was not the original plan. ‘In the beginning, I wanted to play around with standardisation and industrialisation more than with plastics’, she explains. As a child, she lived in Kwai Chung, Kowloon, and watching the constant flow of containers at the port led her to think about logistics, industrialisation, and global issues. Later, she realised that plastic, a modern product, is something that has permeated virtually every corner of our lives and is rich with possibilities for reinterpretation.
But all the most famous sculptures, like Michelangelo’s David and Rodin’s The Thinker, are made from sturdy materials such as marble and bronze. While plastic may not biodegrade, it is extremely susceptible to ageing, becoming fragile and even falling apart. Could sculptures made of this material really be passed down for posterity? ‘Traditionally, art has attached importance to permanence, but as a contemporary sculptor and installation artist, I have my doubts about that idea. Why does a sculpture need to be eternal?’ Plastics can last for a long time, but they aren’t very durable, and this paradox has fascinated Tse.
Installation view of the exhibition Lift Me Up So I Can See Better, 2016. Courtesy of Shirley Tse and Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Photo: Gene Ogami
The malleability of plastics has given Tse ample space for interpretation, while at the same time placing some limits on her identity as an artist. ‘After a while, both audiences and critics started to focus too much on the material, and I realised I needed to use other materials to bring out the plasticity behind things.’ She began to make use of various other materials, such as in the 2016 exhibition Lift Me Up So I Can See Better, which took Oscar Wilde’s 1888 story The Happy Prince as its point of departure. In this body of work, she used glass, nephrite, bamboo, brackets, and found objects, bringing out the distinctive colours of each material.
Soothing Wood and Soul-Sucking 3D Printing
Negotiated Differences (detail), 2019. Carved wood, 3D-printed forms in wood, metal, and plastic. Courtesy of Shirley Tse. Commissioned by M+, 2019. Photo: Joshua White
For the Biennale, Tse has tried something completely new: wooden sculpture. For Negotiated Differences, she used a lathe to create sleek wooden components, shaped as everyday objects like balusters, baseball bats, bowling pins, and water pipes, which together form a large device that weaves through the entire indoor space.
Wood has long fascinated Tse. In fact, her early plastic creations were carved with a wood router. ‘There are different kinds and textures—wood is organic—so I knew early on that wood sculpting would take a lot of time. On top of that, woodworking is a very specialist skill; it’s not just something you can pick up overnight.’ A change of perspective that came with age drove her to reconsider wood—she laughs as she remarks that now that she’s older, she finally has the time to learn woodworking.
A lathe in the artist's studio, 2019. Photo: j.schwartz
In the wood workshop, she noticed that the old lathes used for turning rounded pieces had been left to one side, neglected. At the time, she was studying meditation, and she found the process of turning wood on the lathe calming. As the wood chips flew, she felt a sense of comfort, and produced a large number of wooden components.
The connecting pieces, though, were made through 3D printing, straddling traditional craftsmanship and new technology. The printing process was a challenge: ‘Printing one thing took more than ten hours, and I would be there watching over it.’ Sometimes she was a laboratory scientist, writing down the printing data in her notebook with a cramping hand; other times she was a parent, cleaning out a blocked nozzle or ‘bathing’ the connector after printing. She recalls her strong feelings: ‘The machine sucks my soul. My humanity is being robbed by this machine.’ It could not have been further from the sense of comfort the lathe brought.
Eventually, she found a way to reconcile with the printer, accepting its errors calmly, as she would mistakes that she encountered in her life and work. She also deliberately kept the traces of these errors in the final work; for the viewer, they become windows onto her creative process.
Exploring Philosophical Ideas through Art
‘When I start working on a piece, all I know is the materials and the concept, and perhaps a rough image. I don’t know what the final product will be. I don’t like to decide too many things ahead of time.’ To understand Shirley Tse’s creative process is to understand how she thinks. ‘Art is a practice. I don’t want to turn out a finished product like an industrial designer. I want to think through questions via artistic practice, to hone my sense of touch, and to question presuppositions.’
Language, she believes, can be too one-way when exploring such questions, and lacks vitality. Sculpture and installations let viewers experience things on sensory, physical, spatial, and temporal levels, making ideas concrete and alive. For example, another piece in the Biennale exhibition, Playcourt, will be displayed in an outdoor courtyard space. Through the piece’s height and configuration, Tse aims to guide the audience’s eyes to clotheslines hanging in the air, echoing the residential atmosphere of the exhibition venue. ‘I like to think about the subjective relationship of lines of sight in philosophy. Who is seeing whom? Who is being seen?’
Tse on how her installations Negotiated Differences and Playcourt negotiate the exhibition space, addressing the complex ways individuals relate to each other in contemporary society
Video Transcript
(Original language: Cantonese)
SHIRLEY TSE: I imagine that some individuals may feel as though they have no connection to the things around them. Through this exhibition, I want the audience to be able to see that, a lot of the time, every individual has a relationship to the whole picture and that, in this sense, everyone is a stakeholder.
The juxtaposition of very different things is the main concept [of Negotiated Differences]. In the course of this juxtaposition, those things need to go through a process of negotiation to accommodate other components with different angles and weights; to achieve stability and to counter gravity.
The negotiation is not just between different components, but also between spaces and how bodies move through spaces. When you walk in, for example, you see an arch that I’ve blocked. The audience needs to negotiate their own way through this space, and when they realise they can’t go forward, they will find another way in to continue exploring the piece.
The Hong Kong in Venice exhibition has an indoor area and an outdoor area. The installation in the indoor area sprawls horizontally throughout the space, while the outdoor installation explores verticality.
In this installation, Playcourt, you can see a variety of interactions and negotiations between different elements. Playing badminton over these delicate sculptures would actually be surreal, even absurd imagery. When I was little, I loved playing badminton in empty public spaces with my older brother and sisters. For me, playing badminton on the streets of Hong Kong is an act of reclaiming the public domain. As a resident in the city, you can make use of public spaces for all kinds of activities. In this set of objects—half equipment, half figurative sculptures—the use of an amateur radio also becomes an example of reclaiming the public domain by echoing daily conversations in the exhibition area.
For many parts of the installations, I didn’t predetermine fixed configurations. More often than not, it was during installation, through the process of negotiation, that I could finally fix their forms. The pieces will always end up coming together differently at different venues.
I hope that when the audience walks into the site, they will realise, oh! There seems to be a game here. But how do you play it? What are its rules? I want to leave room for the audiences’ imaginations.
Tse is like a philosopher; as a university student, she was fascinated with sociology and philosophy and considered going on to study it. Christina Li, curator of Tse’s Venice exhibition, praises her way of thinking: ‘Realistic likenesses or technical skill aren’t what Shirley focuses on. She’s more interested in thinking, and she has a real grip on philosophical ideas instead of trying to force them into her works.’ Tse ruminates on ideas, going back and forth through the creation of dialectics of right and wrong, fleeting and eternal, and technological and traditional.
One central question that Shirley Tse has yet to resolve, though, is the role of the artist in society. ‘The biggest challenge for an artist is the fact we can’t escape this society dominated by economics. It’s painful, but also worthwhile—like trying to go against the grain when planing wood. It’s dangerous and you might cut your fingers, but there’s nothing that can be done about it. Such is the meaning of art.’
This article was originally published on M+ Stories.
Winny Leung is an Associate Editor at M+.