Tremor

Tremor is a statement of deliberate refusal, conceived from the psychological fragmentation and self-doubt born during the pursuit of societal aesthetics and value standards. Instead of conforming to the market's expectation of flawless symmetry and sanitized beauty, the work embraces a radical rupture, deconstructing the traditional flat plane of painting into a four-quadrant modular structure. It explores the boundaries between painting and sculpture, posing a fundamental question: when the essence remains unchanged, yet the form and expression depart from traditional definitions, how will people perceive, define, and understand its difference? This core concept stems from the translation of my own gender identity.

Drawing upon Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology and its interrogation of the "taken-for-granted norms" in society, I project my own physicality onto the medium of traditional painting—the canvas operates as skin, the chassis as skeleton, and the pigment as blood, ultimately unifying to form a fluid soul. Tremor questions how a fluid, non-conforming identity locates itself within a regulatory system. It suggests that self-location is not a static monument, but an ongoing, endless state of "becoming."

Draped over an artist-constructed, streamlined wood skeleton, the canvas functions as a skin that loops and swells, forcefully carving out its own space under the constraints of institutional discipline. Every curve, fracture, and gap marks a site of quiet, resilient resistance and rebirth. The monochromatic black surface and the stark divisions between the modules operate like the deep, intimate footprints left behind by an individual in the midst of exploring their own worth and the meaning of life.

Dirk Tsai (b. 1994, Taipei) interrogates queer materiality and the fluidity of identity through an artistic practice that explores how the body—when subjected to institutional discipline—navigates, dismantles, and reassembles itself to manifest an unstable state of perception. His work examines how bodily states move, pause, and locate themselves through constant, visceral interaction with their surroundings.

Drawing upon Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, Tsai conceptualizes his creative process as a trajectory of bodily orientation, displacement, and alignment. He translates these somatic transitions through the anatomical materiality of painting: canvas as skin, stretcher bars as skeleton, and pigment as blood, unified into a fluid soul. Through processes of assemblage, dislocation, and extension, his forms emerge, rupturing fixed perspectives. These configurations bear the sedimented layers of past and present experiences, re-enacting the formation of direction and the construction of meaning through difference, while deliberately remaining in a vulnerable, unfinished state.

Tsai's practice navigates the liminal spaces between painting, sculpture, and conceptual installation. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2023). He was honored as a Made In Taiwan (MIT) Emerging Artist Awardee by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (2024), and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in the United Kingdom (2026). The Chelsea Arts Club Trust supported his research-driven approach to material infrastructure and temporal flux through the MA Materials and Research Award (2022).