For ADAA The Art Show 2021 we are pleased to present work by Su-Mei Tse. The art fair runs from November 3 -7 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and we are located in booth B10.

Su-Mei Tse’s multidisciplinary practice contemplates existence, notions of time, and music. The artist captures the ephemeral nature of the world with its fleeting moments of memories and impressions in everyday life, lyrically translating a passing thought, a transitory state, or a visual or auditory experience. Each work can exude a multiplicity of meanings, but all return to an overall sense of tranquility by creating a suspension of time and a meditative experience.

As a fundamental component of Tse’s approach, photography-based work has allowed the artist to create new paths of artistic exploration. The medium facilitates inquiries for her into the meditative, into our relationship to the world of flora, or into the possibility of a sensitive engagement with the past. They also merge with other motifs more commonly associated with Tse's practice, such as time and the perception of music.

Su-Mei Tse (b. 1973, Luxembourg) lives and works in Luxembourg and Berlin. The 50th Venice Biennale awarded her the Golden Lion for Best National Participation in 2003. Tse was the subject of a 2017-2019 exhibition entitled, Nested that traveled to Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland; and Mudam Luxembourg. Other solo museum exhibitions include Portland Museum of Art, Oregon; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; MoMA PS1, New York; and University of Chicago. Her work is in collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; New Museum, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

“For me there’s no separation between working and living as what inspires me is being receptive in certain moments. I then give shape to an intention.”

— Su-Mei Tse

In Su-Mei Tse’s Nested she continues a series of stone sculptures, this one with copper, that exemplify her vivid interest in what naturally exists in the cosmos. Displayed on a pedestal in the tradition of Chinese scholar’s rocks, these are found natural stones of unusual shape that were kept by intellectuals in their studies allowing them to reflect on the microcosm and macrocosm of the universe. Building upon this notion, Tse embeds various minerals and crystal spheres into the copper. Reminiscent of traveling celestial bodies of a cosmic system, they reside within the unique density of the copper, or the whole universe, becoming a “nest” for Tse’s planets. Nested was also the title of her international traveling solo exhibition from 2017-2019.

The black and white photograph was created on a winter day in Rome, some years ago. Early in the morning, Tse was inspired by the sunlight and the fine weave of the curtain. The enchanted atmosphere appears almost like a delicate charcoal drawing. The artist often treats her works with a painterly component.

Studio 8 (Rome) is a small series where Su-Mei Tse manifests a contemplation of time passed through color photographs. The images are photographs of the reflective surface atop the other work Faded, a series of sculptures that are manipulated mirrors realized by the artist in 2014-15. The reflection captured in this work is of Tse’s atelier during her residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, which was also the atelier of Jean-August- Dominique Ingres during the early 19th century. By photographing this atelier through a faded and mirrored surface, Tse emphasizes and explores the meaning of temporal space that is evanescent, absent, and capable of bearing possible residual aura. 

During Su-Mei Tse’s one-year artist residency at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, she developed a strong interest in the classical world. For Tse, antiquity represents a starting point, a kind of purity that was inherent in the beginning of Western civilization. Upon traveling to the ancient sanctuary of Delphi in Greece, which was once considered the center of the classical world, Tse created two photographs.

In one panel of Delphi, she depicts a grasshopper high above the ancient theater. Considered a symbol of good luck and enlightenment, the grasshopper is viewed as grounded, yet free. This balance between pragmatism and liberation is further exemplified by the grasshopper’s lofty and historic setting. In contrast, Tse depicts a detail of The Charioteer of Delphi, a fifth century BCE bronze statue. Tse chooses to focus on the feet of the life-size work as well as the stone pedestal they rest upon, further relating to her interest in being grounded, or being present in a moment.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”

— William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1863

"Tse weaves physiological perception and personal memory together with art-historical and institutional technologies of vision, extending power’s scope along another vector into a thicker stratum of embodiment."

— Nuit Banai, "Su-Mei Tse," Artforum, October 2009