Cassina Projects is pleased to present Tsai-Ling Tseng's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Cassina Projects is pleased to present NY-based, Taiwanese artist’s Tsai-Ling Tseng (*1991, Taipei, Taiwan) first solo show with the gallery. With the new body of work included in When Feelings become Form, Tseng traverses the parallel universe contained inside the rectangular shape of a canvas opening up to the narrative embodied in the process of painting.
Letting go of preconceived notions and aesthetic ideals, Tseng embraces aphysical approach to the practice. Brushstrokes turn clumsier, surfaces rigidly hard to work with, colors get muddy and canvasses become heavier to handle and move around. The densely impastoed compositions obtain a palpable, organic quality achieved by scratching off stratified surfaces with palette knives and by rebuilding layers. Each layer of paint carrying evidences of frustration and are lent less urgeto break through.
Arching from phosphorescent pigments and vibrant pink and yellow to atmospheric nuances reminiscent of a more subdued human experience, Tseng’s rich palette harbours her obsessive digging for light within the colours. And that search for light eloquently eclipses narrative actually becoming one with it, this gravitational pull towards what lies beneath and beyond echoing the artist’s endeavor to come to terms with and embrace transformative, emotional, everyday experience.
In the pursuit of her own process ofself exploration through painting, Tseng’s perturbing compositions toy with hyperbole as exaggerated anthropomorphic figures, anomalous bodies, animated characters dwelling between abstract fields and dreamlike frames are caught in ephemeral instants of fragility, alienation, eerie placidity while they are being seemingly peeked at through the glass of an aquarium.
More than by storytelling per sé, her acute visual universe, at once tender and threatening, absurdist and moving, is capable of unlocking for the viewer the innate empathy we feel when rather than negotiating form we get a glimpse of light.
