Shirley Tse

I practice philosophy through sculpture-making. Looking back over more than thirty years of art practice, I see how my multiple “identities,” past and present—as a woman sculptor, educator, multi-job worker, caretaker, immigrant from then-British Hong Kong, mental health patient, queer person, and student activist—have allowed me to perceive the power dynamics of the web in which we are all enmeshed. For me, the most fundamental aspect of contemporary art is relation and value: what value we assign to which relation. My work seeks to model forms of relation that feel beautiful to me—relations grounded in greater equity and justice.

Shirley Tse is a contemporary artist known for her innovative, research-driven installations that merge sculpture, photography, and video to examine materiality and social relations. Her work combines everyday materials, found objects, and fully fabricated forms to explore how material social worlds are continuously negotiated. Rooted in experimentation and adaptation, Tse’s practice raises timely questions about sustainability and the interconnectedness of contemporary life.

Tse’s installation Stakeholders (2019-2020) envisioned how differences can come together while preserving individual agency and acknowledging uneven stakes. Combining modular, sculptural elements, the work emphasises the negotiation between people and space, inviting viewers to engage both physically and conceptually. Building on this work, Tse began focusing on the climate emergency and its pressing significance. Because sculpture engages directly with material extraction and production, fabrication, transportation, and real estate, it is uniquely positioned to examine the injustices within contemporary art infrastructure. Tse’s recent works offer responses to the question of what sustainable sculpture might look like, considering the environmental, financial, and mental health impacts of art production. In pursuit of a "zero impact sculpture," she refrains from purchasing new materials and maintains a low-carbon footprint for shipping and storage. She currently works exclusively with materials she already has or can responsibly forage.

To foreground connectedness and relationality as both method and subject, Tse has increasingly turned to collaboration. In the exhibition The Universe Breathes Us (2025) at King & Bang in Reykjavík, Iceland, created with Dana Duff under the collaborative name “Relational,” Tse uses renewable tidal-turbine energy as a framework to reveal a physical truth: forces arise from relationships, not isolated things. Ocean tides—shaped by the gravitational interplay of the Sun, Moon, and Earth—parallel the “tidal volume” of human breath, in which air is not actively drawn in but pushed into the body by atmospheric pressure. Countering an industrialized worldview of the self as separate and autonomous, the exhibition wove together collapsible sculptures, light, sound, film projection, live choral performance, and a published notebook to illuminate the invisible forces that hold us together.

Tse’s other solo and two-person exhibitions include Portal, Virus, Arctic, Pasadena City College Boone Gallery and V Gallery, Pasadena, CA (2023); Lompoc Stories, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); and Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice, 58th Venice Biennale, Italy (2019). 

Tse’s work has been featured in several group exhibitions, and she has received numerous honors, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2024), the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Educator Award (2023), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artists Fellowship (2009). 

Tse received her M.F.A. from ArtCenter College of Design in 1996 and was a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts from 2001 to 2025, serving as the Robert Fitzpatrick Chair in Art from 2018 to 2021.