Photo courtesy of Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium
By Lucy Oster ’23
Staff Writer
The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum held “East Meets West: The Art of Tseng Kwong Chi,” its first event of the spring semester on Wednesday, Feb. 2. According to the MHCAM website, the museum hosted “East Meets West” to commemorate the acquisition of “Lake Moraine, Canada (Canoe Mountain, Alberta),” a black and white photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi.
MHCAM purchased the piece in fall 2020 after faculty members working across different departments met in the 2019-2020 academic year to discuss acquiring pieces that could increase the diversity of artists featured in the museum’s collection. According to Ellen Alvord ’89, the associate director for engagement and Weatherbie Curator of Academic Programs at the MHCAM, Tseng’s photo is only one of the latest additions to have emerged from this seminar, which also led to the museum acquiring new pieces by artists Hector Dionicio Mendoza and Sandra Brewster.
“Lake Moraine” is part of a series entitled “East Meets West” — or sometimes “Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series” — in which Tseng Kwong Chi, referred to as Tseng, photographed himself at iconic tourist sites, such as the Eiffel Tower. Tseng is Chinese, but he immigrated to Canada when he was 16 and was based in New York City for the later part of his life until he died of AIDS in 1990. In New York City, he associated with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and was the official photo-documenter of Haring’s work.
Iyko Day, the Elizabeth C. Small associate professor of English and chair of critical social thought and gender studies, was part of the faculty group that discussed pieces to purchase, and she specifically advocated for the acquisition of “Lake Moraine.” Day shared that “Lake Moraine” is one of her favorite Tseng photos. “It really challenges notions of authenticity and nature,” she said.
Day was interested in Tseng’s work before the faculty seminar. She discusses some of it in her book about settler colonialism through Asian racialization called “Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism.”
At the talk, Day discussed Tseng’s persona, saying, “He discovered this persona in a time in which there was a lot of ignorance about Chinese people, so he was playing in some ways on peoples’ Orientalism.” According to Day, Tseng did so by wearing what is referred to as a “Mao Suit” — a suit that resembles those worn by members of the Chinese army during Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong’s regime — in his photographs. At the event, Day also suggested that Tseng had, in a way, been an inventor of the selfie. She noted that his photos are perfect squares, much like the photos posted on Instagram today.
During “East Meets West,” Day interviewed Muna Tseng, Tseng’s’s sister, a choreographer and dancer who also runs his estate. Muna Tseng shared personal anecdotes about her brother, such as a story about him wearing his iconic “Mao Suit” to a New York City restaurant because he hadn’t brought another. She also talked about his history with painting.
Last semester, in their senior studio class, Fred Bird ’23, an art studio major, presented on “Lake Moraine.” After attending MHCAM’s “East Meets West,” Bird described the talk and Muna Tseng’s anecdotes about Tseng as moving. “[The event was] very touching, there [were] a lot of emotional insider stories that we were getting from … his sister,” they said.
Alvord agreed, saying, “It’s been really engaging … to feel like you’re really getting to know information that you might not get to know normally when you’re just reading an academic article about something. You’re kinda getting those personal stories, and understanding some of the ideas behind the art.”
Alvord also spoke about her appreciation for the discussion that the faculty acquisitional seminar led to. “It was really enriching to hear about areas that they teach … and it helped the museum think of ways that we could expand our collection that would be really relevant to the curriculum and to areas of interest that connect both with our faculty and students,” she said.
Even faculty who were not a part of the original seminar, such as Associate Professor Timothy Farnham, the chair of the Environmental Studies department, have spent time discussing the recently acquired work in their classrooms. Farnham, who attended the talk, shared that he discussed “Lake Moraine” in his environmental studies senior seminar class during a close-looking exercise.
“With environmental studies students we’re always looking at [the] human relationship to the natural world. And this just kinda gets us out of our normal mode of assumptions, so through the close-looking exercise I think we were really able to explore some of those assumptions and start to bust them apart,” he said.
Tseng’s “Lake Moraine” is currently available for viewing at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and on the MHCAM website.