Photographer, performance artist, downtown personality. When he adopted New York as his home in 1979, Tseng Kwong Chi had already led an international life, having moved to Canada from his native Hong Kong with his family in 1966 and attended art school in Paris, France at the Ecole Superior d'Arts Graphiques and L'Academie Julien.
He settled in New York in 1979 in the East Village, and soon after met Keith Haring and other members of the East Village scene, which became central to his life and work. With best friends Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Ann Magnuson, Kwong Chi was a famous documentarian and denizen of the spirited New York downtown club scene. He became Keith Haring's official photographer, created an archive of over 50,000 images recording Keith Haring at work on public art including the early subway drawings and later the large scale commissions.
When he died from AIDS in 1990, he had evolved two major bodies of work during his brief career. He developed a new artistic persona in the late 1970s as a kind of Chinese Communist dignitary or "Ambiguous Ambassador" complete with the classic Mao Tse-Tung suit, dark eyeglasses and an identity tag stamped "SlutforArt". Traveling through New York and the world, he inserted himself in stereotypically touristic sites, from the Eiffel Tower to Kamakura, Japan, from the Statue of Liberty to Hollywood, CA, ricocheting between nature and culture to develop a massive series of self portraits entitled the Expeditionary Series or East Meets West. These prints possess both wit and humor and great beauty in their investigations of issues ranging from the nature of tourism, tourist photography, and cultural identity.
His work has been in many solo shows including a major retrospective at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson which has circulated to numerous museums. His work is included in many public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the New School in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Walker Art Center, the Wellesley College Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, the Hallmark Collection and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His work continues to be included in many solo, group and travelling exhibitions
