New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s was a heady place for artists. Political awakenings coincided with a collaborative energy and a flourishing of conceptual practices. Andy Warhol was the prince of Pop venerated by a younger generation, Basquiat exploded onto the scene with his propulsive, graffiti-inspired paintings, and a lanky, bespectacled street artist named Keith Haring began spreading his cartoon figures around the world through public interventions and mass-market reproductions.
Documenting all of this from behind a camera, while also producing a profound vision of his own, was Tseng Kwong Chi, a queer, Hong Kong-born dandy who found a home in New York’s transgressive East Village before his untimely death from complications from AIDS in 1990. The artist’s playful conceptual photography and contributions to the downtown scene are only now beginning to be re-examined, and will soon be celebrated in a solo presentation by Yancey Richardson Gallery at Independent this May.
Shortly after moving to Manhattan in 1978, Tseng embarked on his signature East Meets West series of photographs, in which he poses stoically in mirrored sunglasses and an austere Mao suit in front of iconic American and European monuments and tourist attractions. The images began as proto-selfies, with the shutter release visible in the artist’s hand. Later he had assistants take his portrait, yielding surreal shots of a deadpan Tseng shaking hands with an astronaut in a space suit at Cape Canaveral or towering over Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
Tseng Kwong Chi, Pisa, Italy, 1989. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches. Tseng Kwong Chi © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
Tseng Kwong Chi, New York, New York, 1979. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches. Tseng Kwong Chi © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
Tseng Kwong Chi, Disneyland, California, 1979. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches. Tseng Kwong Chi © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
Tseng Kwong Chi, Paris, France, 1983. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches. Tseng Kwong Chi © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
The concept originated in a visit from his parents, who invited him to Windows of the World, an upscale restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. Tseng wore the only appropriate outfit he had: a drab Zhongshan suit, that potent signifier of Mao Zedong and Communist China, which he had purchased at a thrift store in Montreal. Mistaken for a Chinese dignitary by the restaurant staff, he was treated with due deference and seated at the best table in the house.
Tseng described his East Meets West persona as an “ambiguous ambassador,” an apt term for a multicultural transplant who had never been to mainland China, but whose journey to New York came via Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Paris. A child prodigy in Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, according to his sister Muna Tseng, he fulfilled his dream of studying painting at the Académie Julian in Paris. But he quickly found an alternative calling in photography, switching over his major before graduating in 1975.
Tseng Kwong Chi, Lake Moraine, Northwest Territories, Canada, 1986. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches. Tseng Kwong Chi © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
This classical training undoubtedly informed Tseng’s work, providing a formal visual language for his photographs. Some of the later East Meets West images were shot in the American West and the Canadian Rockies, foregrounding the magnificent landscapes rather than Tseng’s own larger-than-life persona. They recall traditional Chinese ink paintings in which figures appear as tiny blips in the composition, or 19th-century American landscapes, with their worship of nature seemingly untouched by man.
Of course, these subjects also held a political charge. Awe-inspiring landmarks and natural landscapes have long been tools in promoting an agenda of nationalistic identity and pride. Tseng’s series questions how an outsider fits into this narrative. Costumed in the so-called Mao suit, the monolithic gray uniform that mainstream America could identify as definitively “Chinese,” he interrogated how his adopted country perceived someone like him.
President Nixon’s 1972 tour of China had been a visual spectacle, ending 25 years of isolation between the Communist People’s Republic and the United States. In early 1979, Deng Xiaoping, China’s de facto leader after Mao’s death, became the first Chinese official to visit the US in the modern era. Welcomed to the White House by President Carter, he crisscrossed the country, donning a cowboy hat at a rodeo, visiting a Ford automobile plant and the Johnson Space Center, and making speeches about friendship and cooperation between the two nations. Tseng’s performance mirrored that of Deng, deftly playing the role of charismatic diplomat.
Tseng Kwong Chi, Keith Haring on couch, New York studio, 1988. Chromogenic print, 19 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches. Tseng Kwong Chi © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc, © Keith Haring Foundation.
Tseng was not particularly interested in the pure politics of statecraft, although the Chinese suit had a provocative, identity-bending purpose in his work—it was political with a small p. He was a child of global privilege, raised by a family who revered the arts (his father was an amateur photographer who gave Tseng his first camera), and who lived in comfort in Hong Kong before emigrating to Vancouver. But in America he was othered: a queer immigrant who came to be embraced by a community of rebels and outsiders.
After meeting Keith Haring on a street corner, Tseng became his close friend, prolific documentarian, and sometime guide as they traveled the world together. A visit with Haring to a poetry reading at Club 57 was Tseng’s entrée to the East Village, where he made fast friends with other downtown denizens like Ann Magnuson, Kenny Scharf, and John Sex. Tseng reveled in the intoxicating nightlife and took inspiration from the club scene’s performative energy. The dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones once astutely described Tseng’s “ambiguous ambassador” act as a form of “Chinese drag.” Many of his friends adopted party personas, their art intrinsically linked to everyday life.
Tseng captured this community through his camera, taking meticulous studio portraits of Warhol, Basquiat, and many more. He left an archive of approximately 20,000 photographs immortalizing Haring’s ephemeral public art for posterity. As in East Meets West, Tseng understood the vital power of images to influence perceptions. One late 1980s portrait shows a casually confident Haring reclining on a couch in jeans and sneakers, surrounded by murals and ceramics in his cavernous loft. The graffiti artist, far from being unseen and unappreciated, is elevated. Tseng’s pictures invite the audience into the private creative world of the artist, transforming society’s rebels into the dignitaries they deserved to be.
Xhingyu Chen is an author, independent art critic, and contemporary art specialist based in Brooklyn. Her upcoming book focuses on a select group of artists who have permanent public artwork in the New York City subway, and it will be published by Schiffer Publishing in spring 2026.
