Wu Tsang

Wu Tsang is an award­winning filmmaker and performance artist. Her works explore hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. Her documentary approach combines different types of storytelling with fantastical excursions into imaginary realms. Tsang’s first feature film Wildness (2012) documents an immigrant gay bar in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where she co­organized a weekly club for the bar’s longtime patrons and young queer artists of colour. The bar itself plays a leading role in the film, serving as an omniscient narrator and embodying the real and fantastical acts through which cultural fictions are formed and expressed. Her practice is deeply collaborative, most frequently associated with the performance group she co-founded in 2016 with artist Tosh Basco, known as Moved by the Motion. Moved by the Motion is a “roving band” of interdisciplinary artists, including experimental cellist Patrick Belaga, dancer Josh Johnson, electronic musician Asma Maroof, and poet Fred Moten. Some of her long­term collaborators moved to Zurich with Tsang joining the Schauspielhaus ensemble and share her time in residence here: Tosh Basco (fka boychild), Asma Maroof and Josh Johnson. She has been awarded various grants and currently holds a prestigious lifetime­achievement award, the 2018 MacArthur “Genius” Grant.