Sara Tse

Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity, 2006, pp. 102-103, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are no visible condition problems with this work.
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Hong Kong-born Sara Tse's ceramic objects combine a mastery of technique and sensitivity to form that lends her work a remarkable mimetic realism.  In the beautiful installation My February, Dress No. 200-228 (Lot 161), Tse takes twenty-eight shirts and a number of pre-existing ceramic objects as a starting point.  Her ceramics seem to reproduce the original cloth objects in perfect, loving detail, but the process of their creation is more violent than the finished products suggest.  Dipping an object in so-called "bisque slip" and firing it destroys the original object that is being cast; the remaining ceramic "copy" is all that remains.  Tse's emphasis is not only on retaining the shape of the clothing but also on registering the destruction of the original garment; as she says in an artist's statement, "This process registers the simultaneous remembering and forgetting of an object."  Extraordinary detail remains in every diminutive fold and cut of the shirt or blouse that has been covered with slip.  The object of clothing is memorialized in the process of creation, becoming, as Tse says, "a tool for memory."

In My February, the artist has cut out pieces of fabric, mostly circular, from the garments she cast; these swatches have been fired onto preexisting china, primarily bowls, but also a cup and teapot.  The fired pieces of cloth indexically retain the memory of their prior organic existence as fabric, their white-porcelain fragility contrasting with the sturdier dishware to which they have been affixed.  Tse also attends to the variety of textures the cut pieces of cloth display, which visually reveal the surface but not the feel, the so-called 'hand,' of the material.  Hidden within Tse's art is a sophisticated lyricism that evokes the desire to touch, to feel her objects' realism; yet the fragile ceramics are only emblems of the real objects now lost.  Working poetically, preserving as she destroys, Tse's delicate practice hints at a melancholy outlook, but the beauty of her vision suggest a bright future for this interesting young artist.

- Jonathan Goodman