Several biographical circumstances have enduringly marked the work of Su-Mei Tse, which unfolds between artistic disciplines, between cultures and between languages. Born into a family of musicians, to a Chinese father and an English mother, in Luxembourg – a country characterised by its multilingualism – S.-M. Tse studied the cello before attending the Beaux-Arts de Paris, from which she graduated in 2000. In the video L’Écho (2003), one of her earliest works, she plays the cello in a mountain landscape, whose purity evokes the Chinese pictorial tradition. The artist regularly pauses her playing to allow the echoes that her short musical phrases generate to bloom in the space. Alongside other works dealing with music and silence, time and contemplation, L’Écho was shown in S.-M. Tse’s exhibition air conditioned (2003), organised as part of the Venice Biennale, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Bational Participation.

This Venetian accolade played a part in the rapid ascension of the artist’s career on the international scene. From 2004, S.-M. Tse worked with a number of galleries, including Peter Blum in New York and Alpha Delta in Athens. She participated in the São Paulo Biennial (2004) and held various solo exhibitions, including at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2004), the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2005) and Casino Luxembourg (2006). She completed two residencies in the United States: at the ISCP in New York (2006, after receiving the Edward Steichen Award) and at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (2008). Early on in her career, this trajectory also led her to Asia. In 2004, Cai Guo-Qiang (born 1957) invited her to create a site-specific work on the Taiwanese island of Kinmen. In 2007, she collaborated with Lee Mingwei (born 1964) on a duo exhibition for MOCA Taipei, and, in 2009, she staged an exhibition at the Art Tower in Mito near Tokyo. Works produced by S.-M. Tse during this period reflect her ongoing fascination with the world’s musicality and with language, two themes that culminate in the installation Many Spoken Words (2009).

From 2015, a prolonged stay in Rome, where S.-M. Tse was a resident at the Villa Medicis (2014-2015), and several projects in Japan, where she notably participated in the Setouchi Triennale (2016) with the creation of an installation for a traditional house situated on Honjima Island, led her to explore the potential of a more sensitive relationship to cultural references and to history. She produced a number of works on the topic, including the video triptych Gewisse Rahmenbedingungen 3 (A Certain Frame Work 3) (Altes Museum, Villa Farnesina, Villa Adriana) (2015-2017). For the piece, she filmed “floating images” in historical sites, as reflected in a contact ball manipulated by a juggler. In the last years, her work revealed a burgeoning interest in plant and mineral worlds, and in the “existence of things” – an approach that, for the artist, is linked to Zen thought, which has become a significant part of her life. These diverse orientations intersect in the exhibition Nested (2017-2019), which owes its title to a series of sculptures inspired by scholars’ rocks. Instigated by the Mudam Luxembourg, the exhibition travelled to Switzerland, China and Taiwan, once again bridging Europe and Asia.

Works by S.-M. Tse are held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou-Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the 21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Mudam Luxembourg, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Leeum-Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung.