Jacky Tsai: Unity in Diversity
Museum Wave, Seoul

11th Jul 2023

For his debut solo exhibition in South Korea, Jacky Tsai brings his most iconic works and his newly created pieces to create a contemporary narrative reflecting on our turbulent era. For the past decade, Tsai has explored traditional Eastern ideologies and artistries combined with Western contemporary visual language and culture. In recent years, his works have been discussing the social conditions and sentiments of covid and the post-covid era. This exhibition will take audiences through our collective journey of changing from a globalized community to individual isolated bubbles, from certainty to doubt, and from prosperity to destruction. Ultimately, Tsai expresses a deep longing for regeneration and hope.

Emphasizing the artist’s exploration of different mediums spanning from screen prints to canvas, from porcelain to lacquer carving, and from embroidery to hand-stitched leather sculpture, the exhibition presents 17 marvelous artworks of Tsai. His extensive practice in various mediums adds unprecedented layers to his ongoing discourse of “East meets West”. Divergence becomes coherent in his images and stories. Continuing this cross-cultural dialogue, Tsai voiced his understanding and concern about the unique geopolitical situation we are in right now. Those images and stories mirror our strange surreal reality and bring us to question the concepts of nation-state, isolation, collective confusion, and self-identity. The idea of regeneration and reincarnation behind his iconic skull works represents the artist’s utmost wish to embrace a wondrous yet different life ahead of us.