Grand Canyon,

1985

In these two photographs, Tseng Kwong Chi poses as a tourist within the spectacular landscapes of the Grand Canyon and Arizona. In his iconic Mao suit, Tseng acts, in his own words, as “an inquisitive traveler, a witness of my time, and an ambiguous ambassador.” In Grand Canyon, he sits upright at the bottom center of the photograph, facing a splendid view. In Arizona, Tseng keeps his body rigidly straight and refrains from showing any emotion behind a pair of sunglasses, creating an uncanny contrast with the expressive tree on the left. His intentionally impersonal gestures create a sense of displacement that defamiliarizes the well-known landmarks and calls into question one’s relationship with the photographed landscape. At the intersection of self-portraiture, tourist photography, and survey photography of the American West, Tseng’s photographs contest the definitions of photographic genres and the boundary between creative self-expression and objective documentation.

Yixu Chen, PhD candidate, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University