CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/24/2015

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera

Published to accompany the current exhibition on view at Grey Art Gallery in New York, Performing for the Camera is the first comprehensive survey of photographer / performance artist Tseng Kwong Chi (1950-1990). Best known for his stark, black-and-white self-portraits in Mao costume—at world monuments or infiltrated society events—Tseng also documented the "raucous rabble-rousing" of the 80s East Village scene which included Madonna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, who appears in (and decorated) the image featured here. Essayist Amy Brandt draws a comparison to Nan Goldin's seminal Ballad of Sexual Dependency. But in contrast to Goldin's "powerful narrative of drug addiction, depression, and AIDS among young people living the hedonistic life of the 1980s… Tseng’s images focus on the pure enjoyment, self-indulgence, and gratification of the participants, showing moments of PG-rated fun among them. It is a happy-go-lucky world, miles away from the tragedy that ensued at the end of the decade: the death and destruction of lives filled with so much energy and purpose."