NYAB Event - Su-Mei Tse “one thousand and one dreams behind us …”

Su-Mei Tse “one thousand and one dreams behind us …”

Peter Blum Gallery

This event has ended.

Peter Blum is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of works by Su-Mei Tse entitled one thousand and one dreams behind us… .

In the exhibition, Su-Mei Tse presents recent work created during her current art residency at the Villa Medici (French Academy) in Rome. She works in a variety of media and often fuses sculpture, sound, video, architecture, and photography with haiku-like simplicity.

At the center of the gallery is a set of wooden frames, each with a different size, thickness, color, and type of wood. The work, Gewisse Rahmenbedingungen 2, was inspired by stretcher bar samples available in an art supply shop. Tse’s composition of sculptures alludes to her conceptual interest in painting through exploring its absence and emptiness relative to the frame as readymade. Similarly, the work Gewisse Rahmenbedingungen 1 is comprised of three sets of wooden triangles which are geometric, rhythmic compositions of solids and voids in different sizes that hang on a single nail representing a mathematical selection of an almost infinite number of possible images.

The video, Gewisse Rahmenbedingungen 3, was filmed in front of the Altes Museum in Berlin, a building by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and is presented in a square flat-screen playing an intimately framed video of a moving crystal ball. The museum appears upside down, as a clear reflection, within the ball creating a contrast between the building and the floating sphere. This dynamic resonates with the blurred colors and shapes of the background alluding to the smoothed pigment of a watercolor painting.

The Pond, a photographical floor installation of nymphaea-like aquatic plants, is an organic counterbalance to the geometrical and more minimal forms of the Gewisse Rahmenbedingungen (a certain framework) series.

In the second video of the exhibition, Pays de neige (Snow Country), Tse continues to explore the relationship between image and sound. She is filmed walking silently through the graveled pathways of the Villa Medici in Rome stoically activating a moment of temporal suspension by raking the stones in both preparation and definitive action. The video plays on a continuous loop with sounds of footsteps and raking on gravel creating a meditative quality. Though Tse’s work is often conceptually rooted and referential to specific moments in history, she reconfigures and deconstructs conventional views on these historical fragments in order to sow and illuminate the possibility of various interpretations.

Su-Mei Tse was born in Luxembourg in 1973. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Centre d’ Art Contemporain, Château des Adhémar, Montélimar, France (2014); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2011); the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2009); Art Tower Mito, Japan (2009); the Seattle Asian Art Museum (2008); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); the Casino, Forum d’Art Contemporain, Luxembourg (2006); and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004). Furthermore, Su-Mei Tse participated in the 2013 Dojima River Biennial and at the 26th São Paulo Biennial in 2004. At the Venice Biennale in 2003, she represented Luxembourg and was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion. In 2009, Tse was awarded the prestigious Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize.