MO-SAY IDEAS
Artist Bio/ Profile
Kabo Tse was born in Hong Kong and is presently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kabo Tse studied as an Art Major at the Claude Watson School for the Arts in Toronto after moving to Canada at a young age. She continued her studies at the University of Toronto and obtained a Bachelor of Architecture. Kabo Tse returned to Hong Kong to work and live and then relocated to the San Francisco Bay area and continued her studies of art at the Crucible in Oakland California and the California College of the Arts. Kabo Tse relocated to New York to continue art studies at the School of Visual Arts. She is a self-taught ceramicist who started experimenting with ceramics while attending the Claude Watson School for the Artists and returned to exploring ceramics in New York. Her art installations have an emphasis on combining techniques and details that may be found in Architecture and the subversion and rebellion of the need for formalism of geometry in Architecture to question our connection between the natural and artificial landscape.
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.
Her handmade sculptures are important as they almost exhibit a flesh-like quality with a radial symmetry or a living organism that reminds us of basic primitive life on this planet that began in a pool of water. She wants the viewer to touch the objects to feel the way her hand shaped the sculpture as a self-massage to create a sense of meditative calm and a world to escape to. She creates abstract forms that flow like they are suspended in water to contrast the built environment of the cities we live in.
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.