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                                                                                               New York, NY, 1979

                                                                                                                                              Tseng Kwong Chi 

(1950-1990)

Improbable Pilgrim: The Photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi

Essay by Amy Ingrid Schlegel

    Born in the British colony of Hong Kong in 1950, Tseng Kwong Chi emigrated with his family to Vancouver, Canada in 1966 at age 16, where he attended the University of British Columbia.  Before he left for college, Tseng revealed his homosexuality to his parents.  After living briefly in Montreal, he pursued formal art training in Paris, where he remained for most of the 1970’s.  Though trained in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy in Hong Kong and western painting and graphic arts in Vancouver and Paris, Tseng Kwong Chi found his métier as a photographer.  In 1978, he moved to New York City, where his sister, choreographer and dancer Muna Tseng, also lived.   While residing in New York, Tseng traveled extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, South America and Japan, pursuing both his own fine art photography and his work as a commercial photographer.  Travel and movement, in fact, seem to be the leitmotifs of both his life and his relatively brief period of artistic production.

Tseng’s work engages major photographic traditions: the tourist snapshot, portraiture, tableaux d’historie, and the Sublime tradition of landscape photography.  Regardless of the genre in which he worked, his own image appears throughout his fine art photography in alternately deadpan and insouciant guises – not so much as a form of self-portraiture, but as an investigation of identity and stereotypes.  In addition to his fine art photography, Tseng pursued documentary photography – of Keith Haring creating his renowned subway drawings and murals – and commercial photography for fashion and lifestyle magazines.  His commercial work includes publications such as The SoHo Weekly News, Vogue, Vogue Italia, L’Uomo Vogue, House & Garden, GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Bacchus, Brutus and Beaux Arts.

In 1979, Joseph Tseng changed his name to Tseng Kwong Chi and embarked on a decade-long project called East Meets West (also referred to as “The Expeditionary Series”).   With the camera’s shutter release in hand, he posed for approximately 150 images as a self-described “ambiguous ambassador” from the East, wearing the vintage Mao uniform he purchased from a second-hand store in Montreal, Velvet-Underground style sunglasses, and a visitor identification badge.   In this extensive series of deadpan “self-portraits” taken at tourist attractions in the U.S., Europe, Puerto Rico, South America and Japan, Tseng presented a complex persona – the “Everyman” tourist,” the stereotyped “inscrutable Asian,” and an official representative of the “Yellow Peril” – standing, for the most part, impassively before western sites such as the Hollywood sign, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, Checkpoint Charlie, the Eiffel Tower, Disneyland, the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, and London’s House of Parliament.

                                                                              Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1979 (from the Expeditionary Series)

     Using a Roloflex camera, purchased in Manchuria by his father in 1945, Tseng consistently placed himself squarely, often rigidly, in the foreground of what at the time were considered large-scale photographs (36 x 36 inches).  The artist allowed the camera’s shutter release cable to remain visible in the East Meets West series up until 1986 (when he started using a Hasselblad camera and an assistant), perhaps to call attention to the artificiality of the photograph itself, the construction of the supposed self-portrait as a Chinese national (when in fact he never set foot in China proper), and the sheer contrivance of these mock tourist snapshots.  In the first image in the series, taken on the sand dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, the shutter release cable, like an umbilical cord, seems to connect the uniformed photographer – who appears out of his element, surrounded by nature – to the camera as cultural surrogate.  In this image, the photographer establishes his pseudo-identity as a neutral, asexual, impersonal “ambiguous ambassador.”  It is more coincidental than intentional that the first tourist site Tseng chose to visit is also a frequent summer destination of the gay community.

Yves Saint Laurent, 1980 (from the Costumes at the MET from the “Party of the Year” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In 1980, as a ruse to attend a private opening reception hosted by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tseng donned the same Mao suit and impersonated a French-speaking Chinese diplomat.  A portfolio of 12 gelatin silver prints, titled “Costumes at the Met,” portrays the photographer’s interests in high society, fashion, New York art world stars, and the East Village club scene, all of which he pursued simultaneously.  After crashing the party at the Met, Tseng perched himself on the Grand Staircase and posed with unsuspecting celebrity attendees such as Yves Saint-Laurent, Halston, Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso and Nancy Kissinger.  He also tape-recorded brief interviews in French and English with partygoers about their thoughts on fashion.  Yves Saint-Laurent was reportedly so impressed with Tseng’s command of French, he never caught on to the deception.  (Apparently, a Chinese dignitary behaving like a reporter, photographing and tape-recording the event, did not arouse suspicion.)  Party of the Year, Metropolitan Museum of Art documents a performance in which Tseng, as agent provocateur, traded on his Chinese ethnicity to gain access to an arena of privilege in order to deconstruct it.  Twenty years later, the artist David Henry Brown Jr. (born 1967) adopted the same strategy (using political leaders) with similar intent: to expose the ways in which photography manipulates the image of the rich and powerful, and exploits their desire for fame.

Puck Ball (The Gang’s All Here), 1983

    A denizen of the East Village during the 1980’s, Tseng photographed other artists who loved in the area.  In a series of studio setups, he assembled various artist friends, most of whom were bedecked in costumes, to pose playfully for group portraits such as The Gang’s All Here (ca. 1980; including, left to right, top to bottom: Katy K., Keith Haring, Carmel Johnson, John Sex, Bruno Schmidt, Samantha McEwen, Juan Dubose, Dan Friedman, Kenny Scharf, Tereza Goncalves, Min Thomez and Tseng Kwong Chi).  One friend, Ann Magnuson, described Tseng’s group portraits as “freeze framing our day-glow mushroom-driven antics for posterity.”

A notable shift takes place in these allegedly drug-induced performances for the camera.  In one sense, these group portraits mimic tableaux d’historie, a convention of 19^th century photography in which each person represented an allegorical figure through the use of costume and affected dramatic expression.  In these group portraits, Tseng abandons the stiff, formal, tight-lipped ambiguous ambassador persona of the East Meets West series.  No longer in “uniform,” Tseng Kwong Chi is now in “costume,” so to speak, performing different identities as the bon vivant, the master of ceremonies (prominently displaying the shutter release), and the performance artist/photographer wearing the Mao uniform.  But these group portraits also document a community, a time, and a place subsequently ravaged by AIDS.  Ann Magnuson remarked, “I thought our particular brand of joie de vivre would continue undeterred well into the next century…In each photograph Kwong took, I see not only the faces of the best friends long since vanished, but hear the gleeful laughter of the man behind the camera, a man delighted with life and gathering the evidence.”

 Royal Wedding, “Underground,” 1981

Tseng also applied his craft in the dance clubs of the East Village, using a Polaroid camera.   He created unique grid-format collages incorporating dozens of Polaroids taken during thematic parties such as Royal Wedding at the “Underground” (1981); East Meets West at “Danceteria” (1980), and the Reagan Inauguration at the “Mudd Club” (1981).   In each black-and-white Polaroid, Tseng poses with a single individual before a white backdrop on which other, similar Polaroids are tacked.  Tseng seems to take his cues from the friend who has agreed to pose, mimicking or mirroring his or her gestures.  The signature of the “celebrity” appears under each Polaroid, along with various stamped images and words, including “P.R. issued,” “SLUTFORART” (Tseng’s pseudonym), and “East Meets West.”  Many of the friends who appear in the photographer’s studio group portraits also appear in what Richard Martin nostalgically called these “sweet souvenirs of 1980s nighttime” – homages to the East Village club scene before the AIDS epidemic.

 Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1985

Tseng photographed luminaries of the New York art world in the 1980s with similar anthropological zeal.  A selection of Cibachrome prints from the series Portraits of the Artists features sympathetic portraits of Tseng’s friends in their studios: his most frequent subject, Keith Haring; painter and installation artist Kenny Scharf in Brazil; realist painter Eric Fischl; abstract painter Peter Halley; and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, alone and with Andy Warhol.  In the dual portrait of Basquiat and Warhol, standing in front of a painting on which they collaborated, tension is established between Warhol’s closed form, frontal stance, and inscrutable face and Basquiat’s open form, gesturing hand, and more engaging expression.  In the mid-1980’s Warhol championed the work of Basquiat and Haring, in particular, and befriended both younger artists.  Tseng had photographed Warhol numerous times before – at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute reception and in the context of several assignments from commercial magazines.

 Keith Haring drawing in the New York City subway, circa 1982-85

Tseng Kwong Chi accompanied Keith Haring throughout the 1980s, making over 50,000 photographs of Haring working in the New York City subway, on murals, and on exhibition installations.  In 1984, the Semaphore Gallery inaugurated its East Village space with a show called “Art in Transit,” which included the first presentation of Tseng’s light box/Cibachrome transparencies, wall drawings by Haring, and Tseng’s photographs of Haring at work.  Tseng’s photographs documents not only the way Haring created the now-famous white-chalk-on-black-paper graffiti-style drawings that catapulted him to international stardom, they also document the original context in which these ephemeral works were produced and the reactions of subway riders to Haring’s artistic interventions in the spaces reserved for advertising.

Bill T. Jones body painting by Keith Haring, 1983 

A collaborative series of black-and-white photographs taken by Tseng Kwong Chi in 1983 of choreographer Bill T. Jones, whose naked body was completely painted black with white markings by Keith Haring.  Haring’s graffiti-inspired paint design, applied directly to the dancer’s body, resembles a kind of tribal scarification or tattooing that seems to amplify the power of Jones’ exotic appeal.  As he did with his studio group portraits, Tseng staged this photo shoot with Jones, who poses as if the photographer had, in a split second, arrested the motion of the dancer’s graceful, acrobatic choreography.  Tseng was an admirer of mid-20^th century French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his notion of the “decisive moment.”  Although Tseng’s photographs capture the essence of Jones’s energetic profusion of African and modern western dance traditions, the works represent a produced effect – a performance for the camera – rather than an authentically recorded decisive moment.

                                                                         Grand Canyon, AZ (Valley with Back), 1987                         Kamakura, Japan, 1988 (both images from the Expeditionary Series)

    In the late 1980s, Tseng grew deeply interested in landscape photography.  This signaled a reversal in the figure/ground relationship of his earlier East Meets West images.  In 1986, he bought a Hasselblad camera, which allowed him to work with an assistant, to abandon the shutter release cable, and to photograph himself from greater distances.  Tseng’s late panoramic landscapes, such as those he took of Arizona’s Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, feature a miniscule figure who appears inconsequential compared to the grandeur of the surrounding environment.  It is tempting to read these images, created towards the end of his life, as Tseng’s poignant acknowledgement of his own mortality – although no conclusive evidence exists to support this.  Richard Martin has suggested, instead, that Tseng’s interest in the Sublime tradition of landscape photography may have been based on cinematic precedents, extending the post modernist notion of appropriation in the East Meets West series from clichéd views of tourist sites to “quotations” from Hollywood film.  The deadpan, ironic stance of the East Meets West images fade to black in the late 1980s, particularly in the humbling image and powerfully simple composition of Kamakura, Japan.   In this photo, the photographer’s diminutive figure turns away from the spectator, facing the object of reverence – the world’s largest stone statue of the seated Buddha.  Finally, it seems, Tseng’s unrelenting travel has come to an end as the two figures merge in peaceful stasis.

Around 1987, Tseng began to refer to these travel photographs as “The Expeditionary Series.”  Clearly, his discovery had turned inward, perhaps in a quest for spirituality through contact with nature.   Whatever the case, he seems to have loosed his tether to culture and self-conscious posturing.  Though still performing for the camera, he guides us not as a tourist to places known, but perhaps as an improbably pilgrim in search of the unknowable.

Essay text © Amy Schlegel.

All photographs on this page are by Tseng Kwong Chi.  All photos © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York. 

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