How I became an artist: Wu Tsang

‘My first artwork was a short video called Shape of a right statement [2008], based on a text by the autism-rights activist Amanda Baggs. At the time, I was organizing queer clubs in Los Angeles. I used to throw a weekly party together with friends called Wildness. It was in the context of performance and drag, although I wasn’t thinking of myself so much as an “artist” or even a performer then. My creative practice took shape through all these seemingly disparate activities – learning to sing opera, throwing parties, and participating in trans activist movements. I was just doing what I loved, and it was very community-driven.

‘My creative decisions were based on trying to capture a sociopolitical situation that my life was very embedded in. I now make hybrid documentary/fiction films, and performance has become the hinge for how I negotiate the politics of representation.

‘Perhaps the first well-known film of mine was Wildness, a feature documentary released in 2012 about a trans Latinx bar in Los Angeles called Silver Platter. When I was making it, I was approaching it more as an activist trying to be a filmmaker. I felt there was an important story to tell about the lives of my friends at the bar, many of whom were trans women and undocumented immigrants, often struggling with overlapping invisibilities, and thriving despite intense conditions of violence and policing. I had no idea what I was doing – I hadn’t gone to film school, but it felt so urgent and necessary to make the film. I learned through doing – and making lots of mistakes.

‘That same year, Wildness and a related installation called Green Room were included in the Whitney Biennial. I recall being a bit surprised, because at that time I was focusing on filmmaking as an activist, I didn’t really see it as a visual art. But I also appreciated the opportunity to create an immersive environment, which felt like a sort of protective space for the material – and I felt very protective of it. In cinema, you have a single-channel frame, you have a narrative, and you can tell a story – but you are also more exposed to a certain kind of reductive viewing. I began to appreciate that, with visual art, because you have a more subjective and simultaneous viewing space, you can create more nuanced and delicate layers of meaning. “Green Room” also had a double function as a literal dressing room for the performers in the biennial. So, again, I found myself behind the scenes, more as a host or facilitator, and it felt like an extension of what I had been doing in LA at Silver Platter – creating a space for performance. So I have come to understand that directing, for me, is an extension of this practice. I’m not trying to get someone to do exactly what I want them to do, I’m trying to create a space for them to perform as themselves, or reimagine themselves.

‘Charles Atlas, a friend and mentor, once told me about how he worked with Merce Cunningham – they would build the dances around the camera movement. It blew my mind when I realized the implications of this, particularly in terms of the typical power dynamics inherent in film production, between performers and the camera. It unlocked all these possibilities in my thinking about the politics of representation.

‘So I began to work in a more intentional way with performance and camera. I don’t perform as much in my films now. I did in Duilian [2016], where I played one of the main characters, Wu Zhiying, opposite my partner and collaborator boychild, who played the revolutionary feminist Qiu Jin. My intention had been to collapse the boundaries between our real relationship and the imagined love between these two historical women. But being on both sides of the camera was so intense that, after that, I thought, “I’m not doing that again!” [Laughs.]. Ultimately, I guess I don’t like being in the spotlight.

‘boychild and I actually started collaborating when we met in 2013-14, with the science-fiction film A day in the life of bliss [2014–], which is an ongoing project. When we started, I remember boychild told me, “If you tell me a story, I feel like I can tell it back to you through movement.” So there’s a back and forth about how the camera tells one kind of story and her movement can tell another.

‘My collaboration with boychild has also grown into an ensemble called Moved by the Motion, with cellist Patrick Belaga, dancer Josh Johnson, electronic musician Asma Maroof, and others – often in conversation with the poet Fred Moten, who is another longtime collaborator. We performed at Art Basel two years ago for Parcours and have since been increasingly making work for the live stage. Our process is very improvisational, as a conversation between language, movement, image, and sound. Our collaboration generates the content, which is expressed very viscerally in a live form.

‘Moved by the Motion, and everything I do at this point, is rooted in writing. I write all the time, every day – not necessarily the kind of writing I aim to publish, but it’s where my thinking process begins. I always begin projects with messy Word documents that become full of random thoughts and material that I keep compiling. Usually, when I get to the end of a work and look back through the early thoughts, it’s amazing to me how much of it is all there already. Also, film editing is a kind of writing for me, so the work always begins and ends with writing.

‘I’ve been making stained glass for the past two years, and it also has to do with the writing process. I don’t think of myself as a sculptor, but I’ve always worked with text as a material, and I like that stained glass has a historical tradition of being narrative and pictorial. My most recent stained glass has been made in collaboration with Fred and it’s based on a text we are continuously writing and revising together. Both the text and the glass evoke a kind of religiosity – but not in an actual religious sense, more in a spiritual or ritualistic sense. Actually ‘church’ has a very expanded definition for me that includes queer nightlife. I recently did a film about house music in New York and its history from the 1970s to now, and there are so many references to church. It’s a place of worship and gathering. Our definitions of religious practice, communal practice, radical spiritual practice, and hermitic practice are folded into the work.

‘I moved to Switzerland this summer with some of my collaborators – boychild, Josh, and Asma. For the next three years, I will be a director in residence at the Schauspielhaus theater in Zurich. I’m beginning with a recent Moved by the Motion ensemble piece called Sudden Rise, which debuts on September 13. There will be eight directors in residence and we are each bringing three to four collaborators, so there will be 35 actors, and together that group is called The Ensemble. I’m going to make something, but I don’t know what yet.

‘Winning the MacArthur Genius Grant last year has given me the ability to really focus on my work, to say no to things that I would normally feel I need to hustle for, certain kinds of gigs where I have to be visible for my career. That and the Schauspielhaus are tremendous opportunities to grow inwardly. I’m hoping to slow down over the next couple of years and make something, to see what I can achieve on a larger scale and also to deepen my relationships with my collaborators and with my practice.’

Jeni Fulton is Art Basel's Executive Editor.

Wu Tsang is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.

Top image: Wu Tsang, photographed by Tosh Basco for Art Basel.