Today we’d like to introduce you to Ray Tsung Jui Tsou.
Hi Ray, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My name is Ray Tsung Jui Tsou. I am a Taiwanese multidisciplinary artist currently based in New York. I like experimenting with various mediums, such as painting, textile art, sculpture, dance, music, and performance arts. My artistic journey began at a very young age. I grew up in Taipei City’s center, similar to New York. Fast-paced, vibrant, artistic, and competitive. Most of my family members work in the arts. My mom is a clothing designer, my dad is an architect, and my aunt manages a dance studio. I grew up under the heavy influence of contemporary and modern art. Besides taking dance, painting, piano, and violin lessons since kindergarten, my life was filled with family activities such as going to theaters, concerts, movies, art museums, galleries, and bookstores. Art is always the main part of my life. My life since childhood has been soaked in art. After graduating from Taipei National University of the Arts as an acting major, I started the journey of becoming an actor in theater and film. Only when I moved to New York in 2019 did I consider my career as a solo artist started. The solitude the city granted me can be difficult yet precious. It gave me the space and freedom to dig deep within and centered my intention to create as an artist despite the conventional mediums and career path. I have now participated in various shows and productions in visual and performance art. I aim to continue to create works in the fine art and performance art world in New York, Taiwan, and possibly more unexpected places.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, has it been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Of course, there are many literal struggles as a newcomer in a competitive city like New York. Such as finding the right community, finding the right resource, putting my name out in a city where no one knows me or my past work, finding the financial balance, and adapting to unfamiliar cultural nuances, everything every newcomer needs to face. Not that they’re not hard, but I do not consider them as actual obstacles as they are not personal; they are just part of the process. As an artist, the real obstacle ultimately is within oneself. Being exposed to the art world within the family since such an early age, I have been consumed content that is filtered, or curated in a way by my family. I built a strong sense of what is good and what isn’t, what I like and don’t as if the taste was deeply programmed in me. Besides the education in knowledge, by taking all the art classes since I was a kid and entering the academic art system, I was also strongly educated in the technical aspect of making art. I am always grateful for growing up with such privilege, but as I left the educational system and tried to make art as a career, I realized I was, in a sense, trapped with everything I learned and everything I thought I knew. I realized I did not have the space and freedom to develop my sense of self in art. I can paint a realistic painting as if it’s a photograph; I can sing songs perfectly by hitting every note at all the right times; I can dance choreography without missing any beat; I can do this monologue and make my tears drop at the right moment, I can critic and analyze other artists’ work professionally; but what’s next? So what can I do all these things? Everything I make looks like it came from different artists. There was a while when I could not create my own art; I could only work for other artists. I didn’t know who I was as an artist; I could not come up with an artist statement, nor did I know why I needed to create art, not just because it has always been what I do, and it’s the only thing I’m good at. I knew that to “unlearn what I learned” was what I needed to overcome that sense of loss in direction and purpose. I knew that I needed to forget how to do everything textbook-perfect and how to redefine every standard and break the paradigm. The unlearning is a huge process and is the main reason I wanted to move to New York for a fresh start. The city put me in a pressure cooker in this process. After moving here for four years, I would not say I have not successfully unlearned what I learned, as it is a continuous journey. Still, I am more comfortable making art, stating my idea and purpose, and owning my creativity without doubting whether it came from myself or what was being fed to me. The unlearning process forms my concentration of the subconscious in my work.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might need to become more familiar, what can you tell them about what you do?
Through my continuous exploration of different disciplines, I aim to externalize and visualize the movement of my subconscious mind. I like to amplify the seemingly meaningless mundane, such as making my random sketches and messy notes into large-scale embroidery art. With my body of work, Embroidered Emotions Project, I continue to create works with words by adapting the time-intensive labor nature of embroidery. I am not only trying to slow things down, but also trying to ruminate on the importance of words. I aim to use the energy from the abstract visual dimension to grasp the words and stop them from elapsing with time. While contemplating the essence of language, I am also trying to detach the language and explore and reach the essence of communication. In my performance video work, Body Note, I collected raw movement footage from the everyday during the lockdown in 2020, composed and produced music for it, and then edited it into a short film. I created this work to project and synopsize the feelings occurring at that time during filming. The anxiety and stillness developed natural conversations within the body. Through being in my room and thinking with movement, I constantly try to adapt to the turbulent world and make peace with endless uncertainty.
Using intuitive materials such as unfiltered words, visuals from meditation, impromptu drawings, and improvised movement, I expand on these nuances and create pieces that allow feelings and emotions to organically manifest through abstracted lines, words, and colors. My background in acting shapes the way I approach my psychological world and share vulnerabilities. My work embodies private materials from my past and present, such as dreams, fantasies, and emotional memories. I seek to explore the interconnectedness of the collective subconscious within humanity through mediums such as paintings, textiles, sculptures, and performance work. I aim to create the process of weaving subconscious experiences into a visual language to communicate and meditate with both my inner self and the viewers.
As a performer, I have worked with companies in Taiwan, including Voleur du Feu Theatre, Anarchy Dance Theatre, BIU Theatre, Thatalright Art Space, and Godot Art Association. My visual artworks had been selected to be in The Art Student League of New York’s juried exhibition Life Under the Pandemic Moon and Exhibition Outreach: Primavera. In June 2021, I collaborated with the artist agency ArtsBerry and was featured in their event, The Asian Voice. In 2022, I was invited to exhibit my artwork in Taiwan: A World of Orchids exhibition curated by Queens Botanical Garden and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York. My two solo exhibitions, Embroidered Emotions Project and A Strolling Person were showcased in the Absence Theater gallery and Atmosphere Cafe in Tainan, Taiwan, in 2023. I performed in Performa Biennial 2023 in Barnett Cohen’s work im a pause im a fiction im a pervert im a dream, presented by Canal Projects. In the same year, Performance Space New York invited me to lead a workshop on my movement research, I care more about why you move than how you move, in Open Movement. In January 2024, I performed in Barnett Cohen’s piece whisper economies of blackmarket thought in Movement Research at Judson Church.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
I think about this question a lot in my daily life. I always try to imagine the “I’ve made it” moment more literally, such as winning awards, getting signed by a big agency, being represented by multiple galleries, living in a cool house, raising a nice kid, or something else. People often ask me how long I plan to stay in New York, and I always answer: Until I am satisfied with my career. I don’t know what that means or how that would feel like. Satisfied? In a way, I need to always stay unsatisfied to push myself forward. I once came up with a statement to define success: One day, when I wake up, I feel enough. I do not have the constant feeling of the lack of something; I do not have anything I want to pursue actively. Everything is good in every aspect, and I am okay with waking up every day feeling like this for the rest of my life. That is my definition of success. However, after I came up with the statement, I did not believe in it. As an artist, I need always to have some kind of longing, some kind of discomfort, some message I feel necessary to be vocalized about, and possibly some change I want to make. I need these things to keep making art if I want to be an artist as a career. My definition of success contradicts my natural way of living, and I do not believe I will ever get there. Therefore, I cannot define success, and that is okay. I’d like to believe that the constant pursuit of success is more important than the idea getting there one day.
Contact Info:
- Website: raytjtsou.com
- Instagram: @raytjtsou @ray_the_unicorn_hunter
Image Credits
Social Media Saved My Life (Self-portrait), 2020 (Image credit: Ray Tsou) Conversations with Here You Me & them Vol.1- Why all my legs feel like craved lovesick, 2023 (Image credit: Ray Tsou) 心電心Electric hearts, 2023 (Image credit: Ray Tsou) 有什麼我無法理解的事，是我會想花所有力氣去嘗試理解的呢。有什麼我在乎的事，是我會想花所有力氣去保護的呢。What is it there that I can’t understand and would spend all my energy trying to understand? What is it there that I care about, that I would spend all my strength to protect?, 2022 (Image credit: Ray Tsou) Exhibition shot of solo Exhibition: Embroidered Emotions Project, Absence Theater, Tainan, Taiwan, 2023 (Image credit: Ray Tsou) Solo Exhibition: Embroidered Emotions Project Poster, 2023 (Image credit: Ray Tsou) De-composed Self-Portrait: Function, 2020 (Image credit: Ray Tsou) Still from Body note (Image credit: Ray Tsou) Still from 𝐢𝐦 𝐚 𝐩𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐦 𝐚 𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐦 𝐚 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐢𝐦 𝐚 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 (Image credit: Suz Murray Sadler, Barnett Cohen)
