Staging Visibility: Tseng Kwong Chi’s Performances of Opacity and Exposure
by Vela Xiyuan Zhu
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
This assignment is a research paper examining the photographic and performance practice of Hong Kong-born artist Tseng Kwong Chi. Focusing on his two photographic series East Meets West (1979-1989) and Costumes at the Met (1980), the project analyzes how Tseng stages his own body to explore the politics of visibility, identity, and spectatorship. The paper argues that Tseng’s shifting modes of self-presentation: opacity in his landmark photographs and openness in the Met images, which demonstrate how visibility operates as a performative negotiation.
My research process combined close visual analysis with theoretical frameworks from performance studies and visual culture. Drawing on scholars such as Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider, and Édouard Glissant, I examined how Tseng uses costume, posture, and gaze to manage how his racialized body is seen and interpreted.
Through this interdisciplinary approach, the project explores how performance can function as both an artistic strategy and a critical tool for examining race and representation within Western visual culture.
VELA'S BIO:
Vela Xiyuan Zhu is a passionate write, artist and performer. Her academic work focuses on Global Asian diasporic performance and Asian American theater, with broader interests in visual and popular culture, race, and translation. She is particularly interested in how performance functions as a space where identity, representation, and belonging are negotiated across transnational contexts.
In addition to her academic work, Vela is a dancer and theater practitioner. Her creative practice informs her scholarship, and she approaches performance as both an artistic and social process through which histories of migration and cultural memory are embodied and expressed.