Santa Fe–based artist Edie Tsong explores lineage through repeated strokes of ballpoint pen, revealing the spaces where our inner lives overlap to create new shapes.
Santa Fe, New Mexico | edietsong.com | @plain_song_
The home is the ultimate seat of the local, the distillation of everything that is outside of one’s door. Home is not just a floor plan and furniture, it is something “more intimate,” as Santa Fe–based artist Edie Tsong puts it in her artist statement, and includes “the people with whom we live, grew up with, the people we are closest to.” Even with proximity, these people can be a mystery to us, especially without a shared language or cultural context. Tsong, who had this experience with her extended family, transcends these barriers by creating a new connective vocabulary.
In T’ai-chung, 1980 (Lineage) (2024), Tsong draws from a family photograph to arrange her subjects, which are then rendered as vertical strokes in blue ballpoint pen. Every mark holds the potential to form a word or a drawing, communiqués to close the gap between the self and the other. Each figure appears practically translucent, their borders overlapping with one another. They are visually singular, with only the suggestion of limbs and heads to hint at their individuality.
Playing with ideas of intimacy, language, and perception, Tsong reveals place as something amorphous, the spaces where our inner lives overlap to create new shapes. These shapes are the foundation of what we most commonly think of as the local—collective values, beliefs, and symbols that inform how we live in community.
Each piece in the Lineage series details a branch of the family tree. In Santa Fe, 2014 (Mother and Child) (2017) the idea of ancestry is direct, while in T’ai-chung, 1980 (Lineage), it’s more expansive, evoking the artist’s Taiwanese heritage. The word lineage itself summons both individual and collective identities with a nod to the tangled roots of each.
In Tsong’s work the trials and triumphs of intimate relationships and daily experiences so often kept out of view leave a visual print to match their emotional one; they are scaled up and traced to their origins. And the spaces of transition—between one person and another or between home and the rest of the world—become legible as open doors. Through these overlaps, we enter into shared experience.
