Tsai-Ling Tseng (b.1991 Taipei, Taiwan) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York; USA. Her artworks lie on the verge of reality and imagination, utilising vivid, saturated colours to explore identity and culture.
Working primarily in painting, Tseng’s works depict dystopic and fantastic worlds, which reflect her own intimacy and personal thoughts about life and relationships, transformed by the alchemy of imagination. The main subjects of her works are anthropomorphic creatures, usually with an extremely yellow skin (a reference to her Taiwanese heritage), emotionally characterised by strong brush strokes and bright colours. Her art often processes self-identity through the disruption of cultural and societal narratives, frequently adopting an ironic or cynical visual aesthetic.
Her studio practice focuses on transforming her daily life experiences into visual form. She works to capture the process of transformation itself – not only to make images, but also to use a canvas as a space to think through the possible relationships between art and experience. Colours are the initial marks on her canvas. Tseng try to find light within these colours, which becomes the main character for her to visualise an unknown yet familiar event of the painting. Images of landscapes, plants, animals, and humans are products of discovery within her painting process. Tseng relinquishes control over any specific narrative and allows it to happen spontaneously, whenever images collide. The objective is not only to surprise viewers, but to surprise herself with these unexpected collisions.
Tsai-Ling Tseng received her MFA in the Painting and Drawing Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; USA in 2018, and her BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York; USA in 2016.