Keith Haring, Muna Tseng & Tseng Kwong Chi
Boundless Minds & Moving Bodies in 80’s New York
nai010 publishers
Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi, New York, 1986, Tseng Kwong Chi, © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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FOREWORD Fabian de Kloe
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FOREWORD Gil Vazquez
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INTRODUCTION Cynthia Jordens & Fabian de Kloe
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INTERVIEW WITH MUNA TSENG Interview by Carlo McCormick
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TSENG KWONG CHI AND KEITH HARING’S HISTORIC ART IN TRANSIT EXHIBITION Essay by Barry Blinderman
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KEITH HARING
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TSENG KWONG CHI
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THOUGHTS / RECALL Essay by Bill T. Jones
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MUNA TSENG
140 EPOCHAL SONGS 157
ALWAYS MOVING, NEVER CEASING: ON THE LINE WITH MUNA TSENG AND KEITH HARING Essay by Joshua Chambers-Letson
165 BIOGRAPHIES 167 INDEX IMAGES BOOK 168 INDEX SCHUNCK EXHIBITION 171
COLOPHON
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INTERVIEW WITH MUNA TSENG Paris, so you hadn’t really been living together since you were kids, shall we say. MT He left home at 16. It was in the basement, I recall it very vividly, he came out as a homosexual to my dad. I think there was a kind of a fist fight. And he walked out. It’s one of the most painful memories to me. I was 13 at the time. he and I were so close, because we found refuge in each other when we first arrived in Vancouver. You were both really ostracized, because of your Asian difference, you were dependent on one another. MT We were having a tough time. Art as refuge. For him to come out like that was heart-breaking for my father: he was the firstborn son, the one that should be carrying the family name. He went to Montreal and enrolled in Sir George Williams because they spoke French, and he was always a Francophile, but then he reconciled with my father, and got him to pay for him to go to Paris and study at L’Académie Julian. He wanted to stay in France after he graduated, but he couldn’t get a work visa, so he came to join me in New York. I had just arrived. I had my apartment on 5th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, and I found him an apartment on 1st Avenue and 5th Street down the block. Later he said: ‘Well you know, I love Paris, I love going back there, but New York is much more interesting.’ And he brought some of Paris artists of the time to New York, like Hervé Di Rosa and Louis Jammes. CM
CM Didn’t he do that Paris/New York photo shoot as well? MT Yes, that was 1984, he had the New York-Paris Encounter. There was a show and a catalogue. Kenny Scharf, Samantha McEwen and Keith. He opened up Europe to Keith. Keith had never been outside the country. 1983 was the first trip, then they had that Paris/New York show. Kwong Chi had his ‘oh, I’m back in Paris’ and was taking Keith around, and Keith was like ‘oh I love French boys!’ Keith went on to do many projects in Paris, including the children’s hospital, the Necker Hospital. One of the many public projects where Keith had children in mind. Keith was amazing that way, which was very influential on street art and graffiti culture. Now it’s often like, thanks for the museum or the gallery show, but what else can I do here in town? With Keith it was very often for kids, either at risk or with regards to healthcare. In all that travel they did, once Keith started making money, he could hire your brother as his kind of semi-official photographer, and actually pay his flight. MT Well, he said to Kwong Chi, you’re going to be my official photographer. In the early days—like the subway drawings, which were captured from ‘79 to ‘84 when they made the book Art in Transit and they had the show at Semaphore East—you had an incredible output by Keith, and by Kwong Chi. From 1979, Kwong Chi started his conceptual CM
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performative self-portrait silver gelatin series, the East Meets West. As the big, capital ‘S’, success came, and we started to go international, touring and visiting all over Europe and Asia. Many of his self-portraits were made while he travelled with Keith. What was it like, living with your brother on 21st Street? I assume you had relatively different schedules? MT We got this great offer to share a loft in Chelsea. I had the bedroom, and he had a part of the loft that he slept in. We were a bit like two ships passing in the night, he would come home after partying and it would be my breakfast time, assembling my dance bag and going out to my ballet class. I would rehearse all day and perform all night, and when I’d get home, he’d be gone. I didn’t hang out at Club 57. I went to the Mudd Club a bit, I mainly participated in the big events, like Keith’s birthday, May 4th. CM
CM The Party of Life? MT The Party of Life at Palladium, and later at Paradise Garage. There were those special celebrations. At Palladium, which was a huge club, we had the private room. The Michael Todd Room, which had all these great huge paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Kenny Scharf and Julian Schnabel. I remember Anita Sarko, who had been at Mudd Club before, was the DJ. It was a VIP room, but on a massive scale. Then of course Keith did the big piece on the dancefloor of the club itself. MT Yeah, and Andy Warhol would come. Paige Powell, who I’ve come to know, she would arrange for the limousine. CM
Right, because she was the ad person at his magazine Interview. And of course, Paige was going out with Jean-Michel. MT Yeah, she was at Interview, and she would say: ‘Oh Andy wants to come, can he come?’ Because Andy wanted to hang out downtown! Andy wanted to hang out with the youngsters! CM
Many of us turn into vampires as we get older, so we can relate to that. But I also think our generation was really enamoured of Warhol. That’s part of the reason half the people moved to New York, the way he glamorized its decadence and depravity. It’s really easy for people to forget, but Warhol was really passé by the 1980s. He was rich and famous, but his career was nearly over, reduced to portraits of society ladies. MT Yeah, he was an icon. The thing is, there was this huge downtown-uptown division. Halston, who really represented that high glam and society, had his townhouse on the Upper East Side, and Martha Graham’s studio was nearby. He made costumes for Martha Graham Company that went CM
INTERVIEW WITH MUNA TSENG
The Gang’s All Here, New York, 1983, Tseng Kwong Chi, (Standing, from L): Katy K, Keith Haring, Carmel Johnson, John Sex, Bruno Schmidt, Samantha McEwen, Juan Dubose, Dan Friedman. (Kneeling, from L): Kenny Scharf, Tereza Scharf, Min Thometz/Sanchez, and Tseng Kwong Chi. Min Thometz-Sanchez in front. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.
down the back so far, like to the crack. I knew many of the dancers, we took ballet classes together, and they were like: ‘I can’t believe that we have to tape the dress to our buttock or it’d be showing everything!’
Houston-Jones and Will Rawls to make a platform called Lost & Found. They did a beautiful publication from that and I participated, writing about my brother’s coming-out story. It took many years for the restoration and recovery of what we lost so quickly. It was basically rescuing archives from dumpsters. I’ve told you this before, but what you did for your brother is one of the most monumental acts of archiving, love, and memory. You carried his legacy on your back for decades before people cared or the world was ready for his work. You had so much work to do, because Kwong Chi did so much work in such a short period of time. It’s great that he could trust you with his estate, a lot of people didn’t have that. MT Most families were embarrassed. So many dumpsters, backyards and garages, just clearing things out. What could I do? On his hospital bed he said to me: my work is important; I’ve made important work. He knew it. He did not get recognition for his own work during his lifetime. He was often ignored because the self-portrait series didn’t really fit into that 1980s East Village graffiti/street art aesthetic. His art was very formal. It was classical photography—except that it had this incredible conceptual bend to it! CM
Halston was very uptown. He never came downtown, but your brother photographed him, as well as Yves Saint Laurent, at the Met Gala. Those men had style, there’s no doubt about it. Homosexuality was so coded back for that generation. I don’t think anyone was ever confused about their preferences, but they were like the Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg kind of gentleman. It was Warhol, and then artists like Keith and your brother, who really queered things up, where that kind of sexuality was a lot more in your face. MT Rudolf Nureyev too. The ultimate, with the black glamour fur, and he liked to party. It’s amazing who we’ve lost. Prematurely. CM
The dance and fashion worlds got gutted as bad as the downtown scene. MT I lost one of my first friends to AIDS before it was called AIDS. He had what they diagnosed as ‘tropical disease’ because he had just come back from India, studying classical Indian dance on a Fulbright. That was in the early 1980s. And then Arnie Zane, Bill T. Jones’ partner, John Berndt, all this loss to AIDS. In 2016, Danspace Project asked Ishmael CM
CM MT
Which was incredibly subversive! A lot of people did not pick up on until recently. 19
ESSAY BY BARRY BLINDERMAN
Tseng Kwong Chi and Keith Haring’s Historic Art in Transit Exhibition 39
Keith Haring
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“I think the rhythm, the pace, the momentum, the energy is there in our bones, in the way we pound the pavement, in the way that we rush for the subway and hop on the train before the doors close. All of that inspires us. It’s debilitating and it ages us, yet... it’s our life force.” Muna Tseng
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Choreographer Bill T. Jones with body painted by Keith Haring, London, 1983, Tseng Kwong Chi Photograph: © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Painting: © Keith Haring Foundation
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Boundless Minds & Moving Bodies presents an intimate visual journey through the early collaborations between Keith Haring, Muna Tseng and Tseng Kwong Chi. It offers a unique and colourful prism of the three friends in their orbits, expressing themselves through different disciplinary languages: drawing, dance and photography. Their work and interactions reveal a shared performative energy of the joys of experimenting, openness, exchange and social engagement. Together and independently, they were immersed in and contributors to the bustling and vibrant cultural downtown scene. This book features the 1982 collaboration by Keith Haring to create the set for choreographer Muna Tseng drawing a visuals score for her performance piece Epochal Songs. Muna’s brother, conceptual photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, was a close friend and collaborator with Keith. Tseng’s photographs of Haring’s work in the subways, on the streets and during public performances continue to make them accessible to a audiences across the globe. Next to the work of Keith and Muna, the publication introduces Tseng Kwong Chi’s own body of seminal work: the famous selfportrait series, East Meets West, while visiting many iconic tourist sites across the world during his travels together with Haring. nai010 publishers www.nai010.com