ArtReview × Unit London: Jacky Tsai in Conversation
With Mark Rappolt and Joe Kennedy, on the occasion of Reincarnation
10th Dec 2018
London
On 10 December 2018, Jacky Tsai joined ArtReview Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt and Unit London founder Joe Kennedy for an evening of conversation at the gallery’s Hanover Square space. Held during Tsai’s solo exhibition Reincarnation, the event offered an opportunity to consider the ideas behind the works in the setting of the exhibition itself.
The programme centred on questions of life, death and renewal, taking the exhibition’s title as a starting point for exploring reincarnation and Buddhist values. It also addressed the relationship between medium and meaning: how an artist working across painting, collage and traditional craftsmanship chooses the form through which an idea is expressed.
A further strand concerned the meeting of Chinese and Western visual traditions. The prepared questions considered how cultural familiarity shapes the reading of an image, alongside the artistic references that inform Tsai’s compositions.
Money and cultural identity formed another important part of the programme. The discussion framework asked how capital operates within the works, and whether their encounters between Eastern and Western characters might also be understood as a form of self-portraiture—reflecting the experience of an artist living between cultures.
Bringing the artist, an art critic and a gallerist into conversation, the evening opened a space around Reincarnation for examining the cultural references, material decisions and personal experiences underlying Tsai’s practice.