Wu Tsang‘s films, installations, performances, and sculptures move fluidly between documentary, activism, and fiction. Her work often addresses experiences of transness, focusing on the roles that language and “voice” play in the construction of personhood. Her 2016 film, “Duilian” explores the history of the Chinese poet Qiu Jin and her intimate relationship with the calligrapher Wu Zhiying, engaging translation, the distortion of history, and martial arts. Her 2012 project “Wildness” circles around a weekly experimental performance night that Tsang and her collaborators host at the historic LA bar Silver Platter, long home to a cross-generational Latin LGBTQ community. The bar itself becomes a character in the film, teasing out notions “safespace” through a magical realist lens.
Tsang‘s projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally, including MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MCA (Chicago), MOCA (Los Angeles), Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin), SANFIC (Santiago), Hot Docs Festival (Toronto), and South by Southwest Film Festival (Austin). Her first feature film WILDNESS (2012) premiered at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and her work was also featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in “The Ungovernables” New Museum Triennial in New York. She has received grants from Creative Capital, the Warhol Foundation, and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations.
