Wu Tsang’s works accentuate the intersections of collaboration, performative strategies, experimental processes, aesthetics, and storytelling. Tsang’s films, immersive installations, and performances surface from a visual language the artist describes as “in-betweenness” – states of inseparability and flux that cannot be reduced to fixed notions of identity, experience, or binary understanding. Frequently created in tandem with figures involved in art, music, dance, literature, including the performance collective Moved by the Motion and the scholar and poet Fred Moten, Tsang’s work suggests the capacity for art to express a multiplicity of voices. For The Milk of Dreams, Tsang presents Of Whales (2022), an installation based on her feature-length film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and psychedelic ocean environments generated from XR (“extended reality”) technologies. Of Whales refocuses the source material’s profound meditation on knowledge, exoticism, and eroticism through a postcolonial lens. Imagined from the perspective of the whale and the “motley crew” of sailors aboard the Pequod whaling ship, this complex work sets Melville’s tale in the context of mid-19th century maritime history, the transatlantic birth of modern capitalism, and mass civil unrest. The immensity of the ocean becomes a symbol of the unknown; reflections gesture to the presence of oblique perspectives and complexify the idea that any point of view is singular or straightforward.
Madeline Weisburg
