Dirk Tsai

Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan

Artist statement

Dirk Tsai (b. 1994, Taiwan) investigates queer materiality and the fluidity of identity through a multidisciplinary practice navigating the liminal spaces between painting, sculpture, and conceptual installation. Exploring how the disciplined body navigates states of perception under institutional and environmental displacement, his work examines how bodily orientations move, pause, and relocate themselves through constant, visceral interactions with space, mapping the friction between social architecture and personal interiority. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, Tsai conceptualizes his creative process as a trajectory of bodily orientation, dislocation, and redefinition, treating material infrastructure and temporal flux as dynamic vectors of research. He translates these somatic transitions through the anatomical materiality of painting, treating the canvas as skin, the stretcher bars as a skeleton, and pigment as blood, unified into a fluid, responsive ontology. Through rigorous processes of assemblage, structural dislocation, and spatial extension, his works rupture fixed perspectives and conventional boundaries. These configurations bear the sedimented layers of lived experience, reenacting the construction of meaning through difference, while deliberately remaining in a vulnerable, open-ended state.

Artwork