| Dressing the surfaces of Yvon Lambert’s project space with an uninterrupted stream of translucent words, and with a bichrome wallpaper of Chinese lotuses composed of dirty messages and comprising pornographic scenes, Tsang Kin-Wah debuted in New York last fall with new signature installations. Their underlying “anger” was calibrated toward an American audience—rants like FUCKINGWHITEAMERICANSUPERFICIALIST, DAMNTHEAMERICANSDAMNTHEMUSLIMS, PRESIDENTFUCKING, and others tinted with subtexts of his anger: racism, terrorism, and politics. | 
|
Kalliopi Minioudaki on Tsang Kin-Wah
Dressing the surfaces of Yvon Lambert’s project space with an uninterrupted stream of translucent words, and with a bichrome wallpaper of Chinese lotuses composed of dirty messages and pornographic ideas, Tsang Kin-Wah debuted in New York last fall with new signature installations. Their underlying “anger” was calibrated toward an American audience—rants like FUCKINGWHITEAMERICANSUPERFIC-IALIST, DAMNTHEAMERICANSDAMNTHEMUSLIMS, PRESIDENTFUCKING, and others tinted with subtexts of his anger: racism, terrorism, and politics.
Although Chinese by birth, Tsang, born 1976, is a Hong Kong–based artist—a “new immigrant” to Hong Kong since childhood. He studied fine arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and book arts at the London Institute. He already counts more awards—including awards from the first Hong Kong Art Biennial in 2001 and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2005— than his five solo exhibitions, and has participated in many shows in Asia and Europe. Humor and grotesquerie intermesh in the characters of his early books, prints, and ceramics, in which his disillusioned view of mankind is revealed through caustic explorations of Chinese culture, art, and calligraphy. But it is with his conceptual text- and pattern-installations—whose premises he has theorized in his book Interior—that Tsang has made an impact since 2003. His work benefits from the current interest in the schizoid postcolonial identity of the Hong Kong-ers that is encapsulated by the hybrid nature of his installations.
His interiors are wallpapered with repetitive floral motifs that directly appropriate or generically refer to British or Chinese historical decorative patterns—often colonial hybrids of Victorian design and Chinese tradition. Yet these are mischievously composed from “active texts” of English and/or Chinese profanities in boldface type—“activated” visually through their organic unfolding, which, according to the artist, enhances their emotional value due to its relation to nature. Through their literal and metaphorical bilingualism—Western and Eastern, visual and textual, beautiful and vulgar—Tsang’s vernacular visual (anti)poems release the repression of social reality, employing excerpts of foul language as potent weapons of resistance to the malaise of imposed social normality (the f* word being his staple taboo breaker). With banal word-compounds, the artist further attacks religious stereotypes, the commodified vacuity of contemporary emotional expressions as in ILOVEU; consumerist materialism as in ISHOPYOUSHOPHESHOPSHE; and the art market itself, when his dealer and art collectors become the target of his barely-visible rants in White Cube.
Pseudo-capitalizing on Chinese art’s penchant for seductive surfaces, Tsang litters decoration and subverts a key signifier of Victorian interiority, turning wallpaper into a semi-covert vehicle of public protest and various dissident voices of hate, desire, and, above all, anger. Despite its postmodernist tenor, his work camouflages with profanity the profundities of what Barthes called “that old thing, art.” In contrast to Warhol’s paradigm shift to wallpaper as an emblem of mechanically-reproduced surface, Tsang prepares his stencils digitally but prints them by hand, reclaiming the “emotional uniqueness” that (post)industrial alienation has ousted from art. Political rather than shocking, Tsang’s works unsettle viewing habits. Highlighting the difference between “appearance” and “inner truth” with the disparity of the distant and close (or selectively lit) views of his surfaces, he seeks to activate the viewer, probing him or her to dismiss—yet at will—the placatory familiarity of his soothing interiors for the screams of personal and social discomfort that are buried within them.
