Sara Tse

Dress no. 68 2003

Sara Tse’s fragile, visually haunting objects are made from porcelain, a medium which historically has indicated stature and wealth in China, Japan, Korea and Europe. Tse carefully dips pieces of everyday clothing in liquid porcelain. The fluid then forms around and penetrates the fibres of the garments, creating a delicate shell or imprint before the object disintegrates during firing.

Tse’s work challenges the reverence for objects made from porcelain, contrasting it with the throwaway culture of fashion and trends in her native Hong Kong. Her objects are powerful in their summoning of a ghostly presence; these sculptures closely resemble yet are fundamentally transformed from the items of clothing from which they are made.

The familiar size and shape of these objects plays on a consumer desire that is suddenly disrupted by the realisation they cannot now be worn. These objects are also suggestive of an archaeological project with the garments sealed in a porcelain shell, evoking an almost eerie quality of a lost or forgotten life. This is particularly evident in the crumpled sweater that has the word ‘Crash’ on its front, the once-peeling text fractured within porcelain. Its inference is perhaps macabre in the images it conjures of this delicate object smashing into a thousand pieces.