Brooklyn-based artist London Tsai’s Flying Desserts and Other Utopias is now on display at Miami International Airport’s Central Terminal Gallery, located just beyond MIA’s Concourse E security checkpoint.
“In an age of global tourism and extreme mobility, utopias are no longer in the future, but somewhere else. In order to reach these other places more conveniently, it makes sense that our homes become our ‘ships,’” said Tsai. “That’s why I’ve designed the ‘ships’ in the shapes of desserts we love. In addition to being completely mobile, we are hyper-visible. This way, we can have our cake and eat it too.”
Lun-Yi London Tsai was born in Massachusetts, spent his early childhood in Paris and grew up in SoHo, New York in the 1980s. After college and graduate school at Tufts University and the University of Pittsburgh respectively, Tsai spent six years in China. Since then, he has lived in Boston, Seattle, Miami and New York. An artist residency in Berlin in 2008 was pivotal in awakening his latent sculptural tendencies; his father was the late kinetic sculptor Wen-Ying Tsai. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
“As the title of the exhibition implies, there is great humor, imagination and even, optimism, in Tsai’s work,” said Yolanda Sánchez, Ph.D., Fine Arts and Cultural Affairs Director at MIA. “Through his extraordinary skill and his manipulation of materials and scale, Tsai invites us to re-consider both our physical and psychological relationship to those objects we encounter in our everyday life. His charismatic and sometimes, enigmatic, works intelligently evoke memory and narrative.”
The Flying Desserts and Other Utopias exhibition continues the primary mission of the Aviation Department’s Fine Arts and Cultural Affairs Division to humanize and enrich the airport environment through the commission of contemporary artwork and the presentation of exhibitions in various media that communicate culture, environment and art resources of an international scope. To learn more about other exhibits in the MIA Galleries, visit http://www.miami-airport.com/mia_galleries.asp.