Tseng kwong chi biography of williams
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Photographer of the Downtown Era: The Community of Tseng Kwong Chi and Keith Haring
"One day, in the spring of 1979, I met Kwong Chi. He was standing on a street corner on First Avenue and Fifth Street, and he was wearing these really high-waisted, white corduroy pants. He was so eccentric looking that I knew I had to meet this person, I ended up sort of cruising him, but then we became friends."
Keith Haring in 'Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography' by John Gruen
S hortly after their meeting on First Avenue, Tseng Kwong Chi went home only to receive a call from Keith Haring, inviting him to a poetry reading at Club 57, the legendary downtown nightclub in the basement of a church at 57 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village where both artists would come to form part of a community that would congregate there. Tseng Kwong Chi would soon meet Kenny Scharf, John Sex, Samantha McEwen, Bruno Schmidt, and Ann Magnuson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others, and
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Born in Hong Kong, 1950.
Left Hong Kong with family in 1966.
Educated in Hong Kong; Vancouver, Canada; Montr é al, Canada; Paris, France.
Settled in New York City, New York 1978.
Died in New York City, New York 1990.
EDUCATION
Ecole Sup é rieure d ’ Arts Graphiques, L ’ Acad é mie Julian, Paris, France
Sir George Williams University, Montreal, Canada
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
AWARDS
Yale Brachman Award for Distinguished Cultural Contribution, Timothy Dwight College, Yale
University, New Haven, Connecticut
Award for Distinguished Work, Asian American Arts Institute, New York City
Selected Solo Exhibition
2016 Tseng Kwong Chi: Ambiguous Ambassador , Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston, MA
2015-16 Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Chrysler Museum of Fine Art, Norfolk, VA; Tufts
University Art Gallery at the Shirley and Alex Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, MA;
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Tseng Kwong Chi: “Performing For the Camera”
By Ingrid Dudek
Currently on view at New York University’s Grey Art galleri is a fine, focused retrospective of the works of Tseng Kwong Chi. Tseng’s father, who had fought for the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) during China’s civil war (1946–49), fled with his family to Hong Kong shortly after the Communist victory in 1949. There, Tseng was born in 1950, but eventually his family moved to Vancouver in 1966. He received his formal art education in Paris at the Ecole Superieure d’Arts Graphiques (ESAG) in the 1970s, before finally arriving in New York in 1978 to join his sister, choreographer and dancer Muna Tseng. A tireless presence in the downtown art and performance scene, Tseng died of AIDS-related causes in 1990 at the age of 39.
Tseng fryst vatten known bygd some as the close friend and loyal documenter of Keith Haring, producing over 25,000 images of Haring and his ephemeral subway works. But Tseng was also a prolific artist in his own