Tsai’s lines—whether circular or straight—move. While literally static on the paper, they contain within
them the energy of the artist’s gesture as they endlessly redraw themselves before the viewer. The two
major traditions which inform Tsai’s work—traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting and modern
abstraction—share an important kinesthetic ground. Critic Harold Rosenberg’s description of Abstract
Expressionism as “action painting” is in many ways applicable to Chinese calligraphy and painting: the
paper is akin to the canvas which becomes “an arena in which to act” and what we see in the finished
work is “not a picture, but an event.”
Tsai describes the action of her painting as “dancing in space and
time with the brush.” Dance is a corporeal and temporal art form. What happens to all the corporeal
movement of a dance as it is transferred to a painting? Where is its time? The energy or chi of Tsai’s
dance is embodied in the form of works like Hooked (2017) from her “Icons” series. A thick black stroke
broken by lines of light drives itself inexorably down the composition; but just past the halfway point the
stroke stops and jerks itself impossibly upward against its own inertia, just momentarily, before gravity
finally pulls it down again. As in The Concept of Time, the line in Hooked extends beyond the paper in
both directions suggesting that we are glimpsing but a moment in a much larger, perhaps eternal, life of
the line.
The velocity and force of Hooked, and of a similar work, Waterfall 04, are monumental. We generally
think of monuments as immutable and immobile; but Hooked and Waterfall 04 are monuments in
motion. Their gestures are suspended in time yet always moving afresh as the viewer’s eye follows their direction and the viewer’s body feels the magnitude of their force. Monuments are erected to be
timeless in order to ensure the past is remembered in the future. In this way Tsai’s work is a permanent
record of impermanence.
See Original Works on Saatchi
Lively, happy dots and organic forms are born into the snowy world. They are quietly and powerfully
dancing with the cosmic music notes...
