Su-Mei Tse was born in Luxembourg City, as the daughter of a Chinese father, a violinist, and an English mother, a pianist. She benefited from a double classical education and studied both, visual art and music. In the years 1979 to 1992, she studied chamber music at the Conservatoire de Musique de la Ville de Luxembourg. From 1992 to 1993, she attended the preparatory school L'atelier de Sèvres. Between 1993 and 1996, she studied classical cello at the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris. In 1996, she also obtained a diploma in textile and printing from the Parisian École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d'Art. In the year 2000, she graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ÉNSBA) with a degree in visual arts.

Thanks to the award she won at the Venice Biennale in 2003, amongst others, Tse was able to travel the world (Athens, New York, Osaka, etc.) and to work as a freelance artist. Since 2010, the artist has alternately lived and worked in Berlin, Paris and Luxembourg.

As a versatile visual artist, Tse has expressed herself through various media such as photography, installation art, sculpture and video. Her work is characterised by great poetry, a mixture of European and Asian influences, sensitivity, sensuality and subtle humour. In her work, she has given special importance to the following elements: time (memory), sound, musicality and language. By also referencing art history, she constantly investigates the relationships between sound, image, nature, culture and emotional reception. She often plays with different forms of expression in her creations. Since the beginning, the perception of visual and auditory elements has remained central to her work, as in the video Das wohltemperierte Klavier (2001). This video shows a female pianist’s fingers in bandages who plays a Bach piece over and over again.

In her conceptual works, Tse has explored everyday existence, capturing moments of memories and feelings, marked by her own multicultural experience. The emergence of meaning and its fading is a key theme in her work. An example of this is Many Spoken Words (2009), in which black ink flows from a fountain.

Since the beginning of her artistic studies, Tse has participated in a large number of exhibitions, mainly at an international level and to a lesser extent at a national one. Of the more than fifty monographic exhibitions most have taken place abroad. Fewer than ten solo shows have been organised in Luxembourg. Her first solo exhibition was held in Montreuil, France (2000/2001). A selection of exhibition venues abroad include: Peter Blum Gallery in New York (2004), The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2005), MoMA PS1 in New York (2006), Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei (2007), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston (2007), Seattle Art Museum (2008), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (2009), Art Tower Mito, Japan (2009), French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici (2014), Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong (2017), the Hayward Gallery in London (2018), Yuz Museum in Shanghai (2018), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2019) and the Galerie Tschudi in Switzerland (2022/2023). In Luxembourg, a monographic exhibition was staged at the Casino Luxembourg (2006), at the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean Luxembourg (MUDAM) (2017/2018) and finally at the Galerie Nosbaum & Reding in Luxembourg (2018; 2021/2022). Likewise, the artist has taken part in numerous group exhibitions at a national and, more often, international level. During her studies in Paris, she already exhibited in Luxembourg (1998, 1999). After the 50^th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2003), her work was perceived worldwide: São Paulo Biennial (2004), Seattle Asian Art Museum (2008), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014), French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici (2015), Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (2015), Setouchi Triennial in Japan (2016), Biennale of Sydney (2018) and Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (2021), among others.

Tse has regularly worked with the artist Jean-Lou Majerus. For the Venice Biennale, she collaborated with two curators, Marie-Claude Beaud, then director of MUDAM and Björn Dahlström. In the course of her artistic career, she has also cooperated with former MUDAM director Enrico Lunghi.

Her work can be found in several national and international collections. In Luxembourg, she is represented, for example, in the following collections: MUDAM, Musée national d'archéologie, d'histoire et d'art (MNAHA), Ministry of Culture of Luxembourg and Les 2 Musées de la Ville de Luxembourg. Abroad, her works can be found, for instance, at the 21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, the Centre National d'Art Contemporain (CNAP) and the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain de Lorraine (FRAC Lorraine) in Metz, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Tse has also created artworks for the public space. In 2008, Bird Cage was installed on the Kirchberg Plateau in Luxembourg and in 2018, a work resulting from the video A Certain Frame Work 3 (Villa Farnesina) was installed in London (Waterloo Billboard Commission).

Tse has collaborated with several national and international art galleries. After being represented by Galerie Beaumontpublic in Luxembourg, she has been working with Galerie Nosbaum & Reding since 2016. Abroad, she is represented by the Peter Blum Gallery in New York (since 2003), the Galerie Tschudi in Zuoz, Switzerland (since 2010), and Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong (since 2016).

She has participated in artist-in-residence programmes in New York (Edward Steichen Award, 2006), Bar Harbor (Acadia Summer Art Program, 2006, 2007), Boston (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2007), Cambridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008) and Rome (Villa Medici, Academy of France, 2014/2015).

Tse has been granted several awards as a visual artist: Prix Jeune Artiste (1998), Prix Robert Schuman (2001), Golden Lion for the best national presentation at the Venice Biennale (2003), Edward Steichen Award (2005), SR-Medienkunstpreis, Saarländischer Rundfunk (2006) and Prix International d'Art Contemporain of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco (2009). She has also received two honorary awards from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg: the Médaille d'honneur in 2003 and the Ordre de Mérite du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg (Chevalier) in 2013.

In 2003, Tse’s award-winning participation at the Venice Biennale introduced a novelty to Luxembourg art history (Lunghi 7). In fact, it was the first time that a Luxembourg artist received the Golden Lion award ever since the country had participated. The jury's verdict judged Tse's work to be a very poetic combination of sound, film and space with subtle echoes of political and metaphysical meaning. The honouring of the small country’s pavilion, however, also raised a debate about the placement of small versus large national pavilions (Hansen 2003, page unknown). According to Marie-Claude Beaud, director of MUDAM at the time, the artist beautifully illustrated the cultural fusion in the Grand Duchy, while at the same time being an exceptional artist who not only mastered contemporary techniques but also excelled in two fields: music and visual arts (quoted in Nilles, 24+). The art critic Josée Hansen mentioned the rather rare fact that Tse was a young woman of just 30 years of age (2003: 20-21). The critic also pointed out that Tse had worked on an aesthetic of absence (of sounds, of the beloved, of friends), but with a focus on the human being (2006: page unknown). In his Los Angeles Times review, Christopher Miles picked up on the artist's words about the freedom she experienced in artistic creation, describing the Venice pavilion as "a five-piece meditation on time, space, image, sound – and the potential of combining them to transcend conventional interpretations" (page unknown). In 2006, Hansen described one aspect of the artist's work as nature domesticated by culture (page unknown). In 2009, the journalist Gaston Carré referred to Marie-Claude Beaud's comments on Tse's comprehensive work of art, emphasising Tse’s cosmopolitanism, her search for universal languages, her dual training in music and art, her human and poetic subjects (page unknown). In 2008, the journalist Marie-Laure Rolland pointed out the very autobiographical nature of her work (page unknown). Former director of MUDAM, Enrico Lunghi noted in 2012, that Tse questioned human destiny beyond any narrative (100). In 2014, following Tse's artist-in-residence programme at Villa Medici, curator Claudio Libero Pisano described her work as a play on words in the form of sculptures and an inspiration for a new perspective (60). According to Christophe Gallois, in 2018, the artist focused on references to history and archaeology and questions about existentialism in her work (cited in Nosbaum & Reding). Finally, the exhibition Beyond emphasised the artist's inward-looking gaze, referring to her work Au-delà des nuages, le ciel est bleu (Bouratsis).

Tse is an artist who keeps surprising us with her subtle and constant awareness of her time. By means of her sensitivity, which she conveys in her (sometimes slightly surrealistic) works, she draws our attention to the world around us as well as to our own lack of perception, of feeling and to the absence of life.

Works cited

Bartz, Jürgen. "Tse, Su-Mei". Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon - Internationale Künstlerdatenbank - Online, edited by Andreas Beyer, Bénédicte Savoy and Wolf Tegethoff. Berlin, New York: K. G. Saur, 2021. 

Bouratsis, Sofia Eliza. "Su-Mei Tse: Beyond." Galerie Tschudi. Web. . Accessed 27.02.2023.

Carré, Gaston, and Marie-Laure Rolland. "Des lauriers pour Su-Mei Tse." Luxemburger Wort, XX.XX.2009 : page unknown.

Hansen, Josée. "Surprise à Venise : le Luxembourg remporte un Lion d’or, qui récompense son pavillon de la Ca’ del Duca et le travail de Su-Mei Tse : Esthétique de l’absence." D’Lëtzebuerger Land 20.06.2003 : page unknown. Print.

Hansen, Josée. "Art contemporain. Loin du bruit du monde. " D’Lëtzebuerger Land 19.05.2006 : page unknown. Print.

Lunghi, Enrico, Marie-Claude Beaud, Björn Dahlström, Lucien Kayser, René Kockelkorn, Boris Kremer, Christian Mosar, Guy Wagner, and Mudam. The Venice Biennale Projects 1988-2011 : Atelier Luxembourg. Luxembourg: Mudam, 2012. Exhibition catalogue. Print.

Nilles, Nathalie. " Wüstenfeger in Venedig " Télécran 27/2003: 24+. Print.

Nosbaum & Reding. "Su-Mei Tse: walking and pausing." N.d. < https://www.nosbaumreding.com/en/artists/exhibitiondetails/8960/su-mei-tse-walking-and-pausing...?iae=202>. Web. Accessed 15.12.2022.

Miles, Christopher. “Art pure and simple.” Los Angeles Times 30.06.2003: page unknown. Print.

Pisano, Claudio Libero. "Prendre le temps : Eloges des états intermédiaires." Théâtre des Expositions #6 - Prendere tempo (26.02-12.04.2015), N.p. :n.p., 2015, 60.    Print.

Rolland, Marie-Laure. "Galerie Beaumontpublic : Les 1000 maux de Su-Mei Tse." Luxemburger Wort 04.03.08 : page unknown. Print.

Tse, Su-Mei et al. Su-Mei Tse: Nested. Luxembourg: MUDAM Luxembourg, 2018. Exhibition catalogue. Print.