Shirley Tse to Represent Hong Kong at Venice Biennale

Photo: the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, Hong Kong.

CalArts School of Art faculty member Shirley Tse will represent Hong Kong at the 2019 Venice Biennale, it was announced this week. Kicking off May 11 and running through Nov. 24, 2019, the fifty-eighth iteration of the festival will present a solo exhibition of new site-specific works by Tse in the Hong Kong Pavilion. Hong Kong and Amsterdam-based curator Christina Li will organize the exhibition.

“It is a deep honor to represent Hong Kong, my hometown, and a place that shaped my formative years as an artist,” Tse told ARTFORUM. “Big thanks to Christina Li for visiting me in my Los Angeles studio on a rare rainy day, and for inviting me. I look forward to collaborating with the curatorial team headed by her to bring our vision to fruition.”

Born in Hong Kong and based in Los Angeles, Tse is known for her sculpture, installation, and photography, which have been exhibited worldwide. She is a 2012 recipient of the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a 2008 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship. A member of the CalArts faculty since 2001, she was recently named the Robert Fitzpatrick Chair in Art. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Lift Me Up So I Can See Better,” was held at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica in 2016.

Last year, Artsy said of her work: “As a female Asian sculptor, Tse has had a lot of ceilings to bash against – glass, bamboo, and Cor-Ten steel. But she’s persisted by continually producing elegant and idiosyncratic artifacts that engage the audience formally, while producing a convincing mash-up of late modernist sculptural concerns and something between identity politics and autobiography. With its overriding obsession with industrial plastics, Tse’s work straddles the ambiguous zone between the handmade and the manufactured, the found and the simulated.”

Established in 1895, La Biennale di Venezia – or the Venice Biennale – has been regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious cultural festivals for over 120 years, welcoming more than 500,000 visitors in recent years. In 1907, the festival added pavilions to showcase the artwork of foreign countries. Twenty-nine countries outside of Italy will be represented at the 58^th Venice Biennale.