EUTOPA
Multi-media installation
Porcelain, ceramic, moss, mixed material and video. 
2022. Vienna.

EUTOPA is a site-specific installation which includes several sculpture pieces and a same-titled video work. It’s an opening project of the project space Echo Correspondence in Vienna. The space was the former studio-villa of the artist Wander Bertoni. The studio was first designed by architect Roland Rainer in the 1950s, and its Japanese style pavilion was designed and built by architect Johannes Spalt in the late 70’s. For the first time since 1999, the studio is open to the public again and reactivated by the  Echo Correspondence program in 2022.

Tsao’s solo exhibition emphasizes the non-space character of the house. A place has a blurred boundary of its identity. The title of the show is a double-meaning wordplay of “Europa” and “Utopia” which corresponds to the moon of Jupiter “Europa”.

Her body of work unfolds a glitch, between the East and the West, and its socio-political implications that have maintained and shaped Tsao’s praxis. These have manifested in the wake of declining liberties such as recent western abortion bans, the presence of war and the hurdles of cross-national citizenship heightened by the casual habit of doomscrolling.

It is a tale that embarks on prophecies, portals and foremost encompasses the idea of feeling estranged. Tsao uses her personal narrative as a means to unravel the depths of experiencing the queer, expatriate, misplaced and female body as part of a de-lineated chain of events.

Tsao carves out a span for personal and political reflection, within a pervasive stream of the visual and lyrical. Her return to ceramics, typical to her practice, hearkens sculptural installations that solidify her discursive position combining the verbal philosophical ideas, and magnetizing these to a loaded palpable form.

The same-titled video work is the third part of the sequel “The Land of Promise”, is where Tsao interrogates these ideas as different personas who are haunted by archaic ghosts scattered among precarious circumstances fueled by economic threats, blatant racism and oppressive powers. They experience the female body as a place of suffering and endurance, a place that radiates but is alienating. EUTOPA is then the transit between utopia and dystopia where an alienated expatriate chase their liberty and represent their faith.

Tsao activated the narrative as an avatar, a performer, a character in which she interrogates projections we put onto ourselves that are shattering, uplifting, confusing, and real. It is a mediation, not a compromise of what it means to detach oneself from the omnipresent patriarchy and its implications whilst being othered.

(Text by Echo Correspondence)