Kelly Tsai
Brooklyn, USA
ARTIST BIO
Kelly Tsai is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of photography, performance, music, dance, film and technology. Her persona portrait photo series “SKyGiRLS” has been selected as a 2024 Lensculture Emerging Talent Award Editor’s Pick, published in F-Stop Magazine’s “Telling Stories” Issue, exhibited in NYC, CT, FL, DC, and selected as a Curious Elixirs’ Curious Creators Finalist (top 3% of 1400+). Her fellowships include New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Live Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Asian American Arts Alliance, and as a finalist for Creative Capital and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Her interdisciplinary works have been presented at hundreds of venues worldwide including Fotografiska X VICE, Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, BRIC, Museum of Chinese in America, Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, Whitechapel Gallery London, Abrons Arts Center, Ars Nova, HERE, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and the Apollo Theater. She is an alum of NYU’s ITP Camp for creative technology and 5th Wall Forum’s live performance XR incubator. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
PROJECT STATEMENT
SKyGiRLS is a constructed persona portrait series exploring intriguing women of the Chinese diaspora. Its inspiration came at the height of pandemic-era anti-Asian violence - to seek how unique women of Chinese descent navigated worlds that held no space for them. Recreating these women, I found a healing space to explore my identity. SKyGiRLS draws simultaneously from research, performance, design, found poetry, storytelling, & photography. The series name refers to Mao Tse-Tung’s quote, “Women hold up half the sky.” Each diptych juxtaposes public self with private self. Body quotes were spoken by or about each SKyGiRL.
The SKyGiRLS featured at Exposure Photography Festival are:
PAN YULIANG (1895-1977): Visionary painter, painted 4000+ works, often nudes of women of color, which was risque. Despite top awards, she was stigmatized as an orphan and ex-prostitute.
LADY QIGUAN (551-479 BCE): Ex-wife of philosopher Confucius. Little is known of her, but she knew the man behind the (unmet) ideals influencing Chinese culture.
