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Wu Tsang: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2022 00:25:02 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video

Description

Wu Tsang is a filmmaker, visual artist, and performer who incorporates strategies of activism, art making, event planning, and stage production across a range of multi-disciplinary projects. Tsang combines or juxtaposes the avant-garde and cerebral with sensual, often emotionally charged representations that prompt deeper inquiries into how individuals and communities resist ingrained social prejudices. Her work also considers prescient debates about a generation's claim to a subculture, social gathering as a form of insurgency, and the political capacity of contemporary art.

In this interview, Tsang talks about the relationship between art and activism in her work, influential teachers and collaborators, the significance of music and space, and “inbetweeness.”

Interviewed by Mary Coyne. 

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.