Tseng Kwong Chi American, 1950-1990

Tseng Kwong Chi was born in Hong Kong in 1950 and died in New York in 1990. In the brief span of his life, he produced a body of work that remains startlingly contemporary: photographs that blur the line between truth and fiction, teasing out the uneasy borderlands of identity, belonging and cultural inheritance. The son of exiled Chinese nationalists, Tseng arrived in New York in 1979, settling in the East Village just as it was becoming the crucible of a new artistic avant-garde. There, he moved among a close-knit cohort – Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Cindy Sherman – whose work came to define the era.

Fluent in French, English and Chinese, Tseng described himself as a citizen of the world, though the reality was more complicated: never quite insider, never fully outsider. Dressed in a Mao suit and mirrored sunglasses, he staged a fictional self – part diplomat, part tourist – and turned the camera on himself, long before the selfie was codified by social media. These images, at once deadpan and full of sly humour, performed a kind of cultural judo: they exposed the absurdities of power, prejudice and spectacle by inhabiting them so completely.

Tseng’s photographs sit at the crossroads of performance, conceptual art and autobiography. They are deeply personal, overtly political, and laced with irony. Thirty years after his death, his work continues to speak with startling clarity about the ambiguities of global identity and the performative nature of belonging.

Tseng and his family emigrated to Canada, where he attended universities in Vancouver and Montreal, before moving to Paris where he studied art and photography at the Académie Julian. Tseng’s photographs were shown publicly in China for the first time at the 2004 Shanghai Biennale. His work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; M+, Hong Kong; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Britain, London; and the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.