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Charwei Tsai
Driftwood Mantra, 2020

Photo: Roberto Ruiz | courtesy the artist and mor charpentier, Paris

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Charwei Tsai

Ink on driftwood, on a mirror
39 x 60 x 30 cm (sculpture)
55 x 35 x 80 cm (plinth with mirror plate)

Multi-disciplinary artist Charwei Tsai (b.1980, Taipei, Taiwan) works with performance, video art, calligraphy, painting and photography using an introspective process as well as politically engaged documentation of marginalised and indigenous communities, exploring social and environmental issues. Tsai has returned to the act of inscribing on objects many times over her career, and in Driftwood Mantra she does so again, with a piece of driftwood covered in text and reflected in a mirror positioned at its base. Often these objects are organic and are, or were, alive, and this encourages the viewer to consider the relationship between nature and humanity that the artist is concerned with, as well as the idea of transience as these materials inevitably decay. Previously, Tsai has written on a large slab of raw meat in Meat Map (2008), the size and thinness of which bringing to mind a large sheet of paper, or an ancient scroll on which is written religious text. In Lotus Mantra II (2006), Tsai wrote in ink onto the still living leaf of a lotus plant and in the performance piece Plane Tree Mantra (2014), viewers and passersby were invited to watch as she inscribed long passages onto the trunk of a plane tree in Jardin des Plantes, Paris. In more recent work, Tsai has written on rapidly melting ice in the video work Numbers (2020), accompanied by a voice recording from the granddaughter of the political prisoner Yang Kui. The term ‘mantra’ often appears in these works, and Tsai has described how the religious connotations that the term promotes is in relation to the Buddhist concept of ‘emptiness’, which is as much a philosophical concept for Tsai as it is religious. When writing, she inhabits a contemplative space in which the concept of ‘emptiness' is at the forefront, and she meditates on the below excerpt from the Heart Sutra as she writes:

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form
Emptiness is not separate from form,
Form is not separate from emptiness.

Through this meditative contemplation, Tsai engages with the personal, including her Taiwanese identity and Buddhist spirituality, and the universal experiences of form and void, growth and decay, living and dead.

Charwei Tsai was born in 1980 in Taipei, Taiwan. She attended Taipei American School in Taipei, and Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California.^[1] Tsai graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 with a degree in Industrial Design, and completed a postgraduate research program at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2010.^[1]^[2]
Tsai moved to New York City in 2002. She took a part-time job at Printed Matter, and volunteered at Tibet House, where she grew her interest in Buddhist philosophy. Tsai worked as an assistant in Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang's studio in New York from 2004 to 2006. She was also influenced by the earthworks series of artist Robert Smithson.^[1]
Tsai has worked as an artist in Taipei, Paris, and Ho Chi Minh City. In 2005, she founded the art journal Lovely Daze.^[3] Her work has been widely exhibited in international museums, galleries, biennials, and art fairs.

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artists website

http://charwei.com

Charwei TsaiDriftwood Mantra, 2020

Charwei Tsai
Driftwood Mantra, 2020