Tseng Kwong Chi | |
---|---|
Born | Joseph Tseng September 6, 1950 |
Died | March 10, 1990
Manhattan,
New York City, United States | (aged 39)
Occupation | Photographer |
Years active | 1979–1989 |
Notable work | East Meets West |
Website |
tsengkwongchi |
Tseng Kwong Chi, known as Joseph Tseng prior to his professional career [1] ( Chinese: 曾廣智; September 6, 1950 – March 10, 1990), was a Hong Kong-born American photographer who was active in the East Village [1] art scene in the 1980s. He is the brother of dancer/choreographer Muna Tseng.
Tseng was part of a circle of artists in the 1980s New York art scene including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Cindy Sherman. [2]
Tseng's most famous body of work is his self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the "Expeditionary Series". In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his " Mao suit" and sunglasses (dubbed a "wickedly surrealistic persona" [1] by The New York Times) and photographed himself situated, often emotionlessly, in front of iconic tourist sites. These included the Statue of Liberty, Cape Canaveral, Disneyland, [1] Notre-Dame de Paris, and the World Trade Center.
Tseng also took over 40,000 of photographs of New York graffiti artist Keith Haring [3] throughout the 1980s working on murals, installations and the subway. [4] In 1984, his photographs were shown with Haring's work at the opening of the Semaphore Gallery East location in a show titled "Art in Transit". Tseng photographed[ when?] the first Concorde landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, from the tarmac. [1] According to his sister, Tseng drew artistic influence from Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson. [1]
Tseng's father was a Kuomintang officer who fled Shanghai in 1949 when the Communists won the Chinese Civil War. [5] Tseng was born in British Hong Kong the following year [5] and was a child prodigy in Chinese painting and calligraphy. [1] He was educated at St Joseph's College [5] before his parents moved the family to Canada when he was 16. [5] He originally studied painting at Académie Julian in Paris, [6] but switched to photography after one year, [1] having gained an interest photography after his father gave him a Rolleiflex camera. [5] He moved to Manhattan's East Village in 1979, [3] [5] where he soon met fellow avant-garde artists Haring, [3] [5] Scharf, [3] [5] Jean-Michel Basquiat, [5] and Ann Magnuson. [3]
Tseng started documenting Haring's work through photograph in 1979, travelling with him from 1982-1989, expanding his own East Meets West series. [7]
Tseng died of AIDS-related illness in 1990, [4] [8] and was survived by his companion of seven years, Robert-Kristoffer Haynes, who remains a resident of New York City[ as of?] and serves as Registrar at Paula Cooper Gallery.[ as of?] Tseng's work is in the public collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. [9] Tseng has been included in the Asian American Arts Centre's digital archive. [10]
To complete the image, he dropped the name he had always used, Joseph, and began using his Chinese name, Kwong Chi. And he insisted on the traditional last-name-first sequence, as in Mao Zedong.