Shirley Tse, "Framing Device" (2020), Giclee print mounted on sintra, basement window, wood, 45 1/2 x 29 x 14 inches (all images courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery)
July 27, 2022
By Vanessa Holyoak
LOS ANGELES — The Hong Kong-born, California-based artist Shirley Tse left her Los Angeles home behind for the coastal town of Lompoc, California, during the course of the pandemic. The artist’s personal experiences are inextricable from her artwork: Each piece in Lompoc Stories, her solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, is priced at $3,360, a number that reflects the fixed monthly cost of renting her Los Angeles studio in order to sustain her visual practice. The decision to price her work this way became a conceptual element of the show, which centers on themes of sustainability, both ecological and economical. The press release includes the following note from the artist: “Lompoc Stories began as Los Angeles became unsustainable to me. I wish to shift the focus from commodity to sustaining the condition for making work.”
Fittingly, the stakes of the sculptures and video pieces that make up Lompoc Stories are both loftier and more equitable than the whims of the commodity-driven art market. Building on Stakeholders, Tse’s body of work representing Hong Kong at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Lompoc Stories ask incisive questions about what it means to hold a stake on a planetary scale, in the context of anthropogenic climate change. In light of the societal upheaval prompted by the pandemic — and the extreme economic disparity it exacerbated — and in search of a more sustainable art practice, the artist’s relocation to Lompoc (whose name means “stagnant waters” or “lagoon” in the Chumash language of Purisemeño) reflects these broader conditions. These aspects all intimately inform the enmeshed conceptual and material choices that make up her exhibition.
