Visual artist Lauren Tsai on navigating memory, fantasy and reality

Whichever medium she chooses, her art is always recognisable for its somewhat dark, haunting and fantastical vibe. It is as if the images are revealing her inner conflict and process of self-discovery. While the visuals don’t follow a conventional plot, they are enactments of scenes based on her memories and imagination. “A memory is the last time you thought of something. Every single time you think of it, it changes a little in shape and form. I’m trying to capture a certain texture of my memories and to be able to try to understand what it means to have to live in the presence of this data of memories,” she says. “That’s also the idea behind my current installation.”

For instance, in My Dream: Our Hill, the apple tree—the centrepiece of the installation—comes from her “recurring memory of an impactful moment in my childhood”. She remembers walking through the forest and discovering “a single ginkgo tree on top of a hill whose abundant fan-like leaves were raining down on me. I thought it was this magical thing that I had found. I have this memory of spinning around all these leaves raining around me. I doubt that it happened, but something similar must have taken place so that I experienced at least the image of the hill.” She would, later in her art practice, come back to this motif of a hill many times, as she got exposed to animated films where hills are a place of rest and introspection: “This was how I became very attached to animated films, especially during some hard times. I was very lonely in school. I’ve always been very introverted.”

The apples come from the memory of apple picking with her family when she was a young child in Massachusetts. “When I moved to Hawaii, [I found that] apple trees don’t grow there. So the apple tree became a symbolic and almost mythical thing. It’s an exploration of how we cannot choose what becomes a myth to us,” she says. “Everyone has something in their childhood that then becomes this aspirational symbol or obsession in their adulthood.”

The obsession with art came early for the artist. “Drawing made up all of my most vivid and exciting childhood memories, like drawing under my desk at night or creating little stories in notebooks at school,” she recalls. When she turned 11, she was first introduced to the internet and started doing illustration and animation. “I had a very interesting start [as an artist], because a lot of artists start in a very traditional way: go to an art school, or get a bachelor’s or master’s degree in fine arts. I started with digital art on the internet. So my paintings and analogue work had a very digital influence to them.” Her time in Tokyo, where she pursued art, further exposed her to Asian art and animation that morphed her artistic style into what it is today.

And she hasn’t stopped exploring her style since. Recently, she has turned from the digital to analogue art. “In the past, I did everything on Photoshop from start to finish. Nowadays, I start with analogue: sometimes I scan it and colour it digitally. But for most of my work, I try to keep them as analogue as possible,” she says. “I don’t know why that has occurred. Perhaps because there’s so much information online, and there’s such a large archive of my work on my computer, it’s too much. It doesn’t feel real. So I need to have something.”

However, art isn’t the only means of expression for Tsai. She is also a model and an actor, having acted in Netflix shows. But even as her acting and modelling career flourished, Tsai found herself turning more towards art. “Having all of me be seen so widely made me feel split. I needed a place to escape and explore things I didn’t feel comfortable [doing] as myself. The more public pressure and scrutiny I’ve got, the more I need somewhere else [where I can say] what I want to,” she says. “That’s how I became more attached to my art at that point.”

She doesn’t always separate her art from her acting, however, “because the way I can express through animation [isn’t] any different from when I am acting as myself. My animation is acting for me.”

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