Charwei Tsai: Root of Desire

The exhibition “Root of Desire” displays works by the artist Charwei Tsai which investigate the topic of desire and Tsai’s research on the Vimalakirti Sutra. The latter is an ancient spiritual text and one the first recorded in Asia which alludes to topics such as social equality and sameness. The pieces on view are explicative of Tsai’s long-term examination of Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna Buddhism: the new video installation “Root of Desire” (2018) represents the artist’s journey through a desert landscape, as a metaphor of the search for desire in its different manifestations. The series of landscape drawings “The Goddess” (2018), complemented by extracts from the sacred text, references to Buddhist philosophy while three other video installations, “Songs of Chuchepati Camp, Nepal” (2017), “Hear Her Singing” (2017), and “Songs of Kaohsiung Migrant Workers” (2018), collect voices of people from all over the world, struck by social, political or economic injustice