Artist Bio/ Profile
Artist Bio:
Ka-bo Tse is a recently returned Toronto based artist and designer with influences as a former New Yorker living in the United States as an artist and designer in Brooklyn with cultural inspiration and influence as an expat living abroad with travels to the East including Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Myanmar. Her art practice in Brooklyn birthed her manifesto “Mosaicismalism” embodying a fusion of art and design. Her creations have an emphasis on combining techniques and processes from her design discipline and her organic ceramic art sculptures which seek to question our connection between the natural and artificial “designed” world. She uses her interest in sustainability and wellness to promote public activism. She is passionate about using sustainable materials and is committed to reducing her environmental impact by utilizing natural and recycled materials to be socially responsible.
She hopes her art will inspire public engagement to promote sustainability and to inspire individual action to help protect our planet and to promote social connectivity. She was selected as an CSMN Arts leader by Arts Build Ontario 2023-2024 to develop her community sustainability project called “Smad “or “Sustainable Market Art + Design” to promote community market pop-ups and sustainable education around climate change with an art and design market to mentor future generations.
Exhibitions
She has had her art jewelry exhibited at SOFA New York at Charon Kransen Arts in 2010. She has participated in group exhibitions for Bushwick open studios and Greenpoint open Studios in 2012-2016 in New York displaying sculptures, installations and paintings. She has had her ceramic art work shown at an exhibition at the Lorimoto Gallery in 2016 in Ridgewood, New York. In 2018 she exhibited at the Andrew Edlin Gallery during the Outsider Art Fair. She also participated in an online SeeMe Video exhibition in 2019 in New York displaying her ceramic sculptures.
Artist Statement
Kabo Tse’s work attempts to create a world which acts as a reminder that we need to return to a natural biomorphic way of life and integrate this philosophy in our built environment.
The sculptural objects that she creates are like moss or lichen that grows in the forest foliage parallel to how art objects people possess is an artifact of nature found as a domestic object in everyday life. Ceramics is a common day material found in everyone’s home and has a sense of bringing “home sweet home” to make us feel safe and comfortable with a “craft-like” object by our side.
Ka-Bo Tse’s work creates an imaginary world which acts as a reminder of one’s origins, posing questions about our own existence. My art creates a state of meditation to connect humans to their origins and earth with principles of wellness and sustainability to remind us that we all come from the same beginning and share commonality in birth, life and death like water ebbs and flows in a spirit that emanates from nature. My work explores the intersection of art and contemporary design while combining techniques of traditional craft using materials like ceramics and paintings to create a dialogue that challenges traditional notions of craft and design, beauty, materiality, and spirituality. I want the viewer to feel the way my hand shaped the sculpture as a self-massage to create a sense of meditative calm and to evoke a primal connection to nature.
Inspiration and Meditation
Memories of my childhood resonate with the floating mobile objects abstracted as a recollection of a baby mobile suspending above my crib evocating the loneliness in the darkness with abstracted memories that are haunting yet comforting. The blue and white remind me of the ocean and the sky of Repulse Bay in Hong Kong and my weekly visits with my parents to the beach.
The white reminds me of the changing sky with clouds drifting and the sea shells that I would find with the lines of life etched into them which I would trace with my fingers like fingerprints and my comparison of life and death. The “sea shells” dangle on ropes that are clothing lines reminding me of domestic life and laundry or fish suspended from a rope with memories of visits to the market and family fishing outings.