Exhibitions
SENSING THE FUTURE: EXPERIMENTS IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY (E.A.T) 2025
From May 1, 2025 to January 11, 2026, Wen-Ying Tsai’s Cybernetic Sculpture System No. 3 was exhibited at LUMA Arles in southern France. As a part of the exhibition Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T), and in partnership with the Getty Research Institute (L.A.), the story of a unique organization, E.A.T., was presented. In the 1960s and 70s, this organization fostered collaborations between engineers and artists whose works have had an undeniable impact on contemporary art.
ELECTRIC DREAMS: ART AND TECHNOLOGY BEFORE THE INTERNET, 2024-2025
From late Fall of 2024 until mid-2025, two of Wen-Ying Tsai’s works in the Tate collection: Umbrella and Square Tops were exhibited as part of the expansive Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet exhibition at Tate Modern, London UK. Experience the cybernetic feedback of Tsai’s pioneering works amid those of his contemporaries as they applied science, technology, algorithms and new media to their creations. (November 28, 2024 – June 1, 2025.)
THE DYNAMIC EYE EXHIBITION AT ARTISTANBUL FESHANE, 2024
Wen-Ying Tsai’s Square Tops was part of The Dynamic Eye exhibition at ArtIstanbul Feshane in Istanbul, Turkey until May 19th, 2024. The show presents pioneering works in optical and kinetic art dating from the 1950s and 1960s. This show was previously featured at the new Atkinson Museum in Porto, Portugal (July 4 – November 19, 2023).
TRANSGENERATIONAL CYBERNETIC ART, 2023
In 2023, Wen-Ying Tsai’s artworks were presented as a part of a Transgenerational Cybernetic Art exhibition at Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk, Poland (July 27 – December 10, 2023). Six of his works were diplayed presenting his artistic practice from optical art to kinetic, and to cybernetic. Following the exhibition, a new book of articles, Tsaibernetics, with a collection of fresh perspectives on the Tsai cybernetic artistic practice was published in early 2024.
THE DYNAMIC EYE: OP AND KINETIC ART, 2022-2023
After over 20 years, Wen-Ying Tsai’s work returned to China as part of an exhibition titled The Dynamic Eye: Op and Kinetic Art from the Tate Collection at Shanghai’s Museum of Art Pudong (MAP). The exhibition touched upon important groups of artists who chose to work together, such as GRAV, Zero, Signals, New Tendencies, CAVS as well as exhibitions that were foundational to the development of Op and Kinetic Art, like The Responsive Eye (1965, New York) and The Machine Show (1968, New York). This is a traveling exhibition in Asia co-organized by MAP and Tate that was presented in Shanghai from September 30, 2022 – May 21, 2023.
In 2022, we participated in a number of exhibitions in Europe and Asia. Among these was the inaugural exhibition Kinetismus of the new Kunsthalle Praha museum in the Czech Republic. This was an ambitious inaugural exhibition, whose full title was Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art, that brought together major kinetic works of nearly a hundred artists of the 20th century (February 22 – August 29, 2022).
NEGATIVE SPACE – TRAJECTORIES OF SCULPTURE, 2019
The Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medien (ZKM, Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe Germany hosted “Negative Space – Trajectories of sculpture,” the follow-up exhibition to Centre George Pompidou’s renown 1986 show “Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne?” or “What is modern sculpture?” This ambitious exhibit showcased Tsai’s “Single Diffraction” among many of the works of his contemporaries. Additionally, Wen-Ying Tsai’s work was accompanied by his son London Tsai’s piece “Hopf Fibration – a rotor-generated space.” This unique co-location of father and son’s works is a demonstration of how, in one clear manner, the senior Tsai’s work continues to evolve into the 21st Century. The exhibit Negative Space was from April 6 – August 11, 2019.
CAVS 50TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION, 2019
The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT was an important anchor in Wen-Ying Tsai’s artistic career. Although he had already developed his mature cybernetic work before being invited by Gyorgy Kepes and Otto Piene to be amongst the Center’s first Fellows in 1969, Tsai always saw CAVS as a spiritual epicenter for the kind of work he was doing. It was there that Tsai made life-long connections with artists that were working in the same direction using art, technology, and science in their practices. Tsai’s cybernetic sculpture “Large Tuning Fork” was shown at the MIT Museum as part of the CAVS 50th Anniversary exhibition, February 15, 2018 – January 30, 2019.
CYBERNETIC SCULPTURE ENVIRONMENT: NEW WORK DONE AT THE MIT CENTER FOR ADVANCED VISUAL STUDIES
This poster (black with silver imprint) was designed by Jacqueline Casey for Tsai’s exhibit “Cybernetic Sculpture Environment: New work done at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies” at the Hayden Gallery, MIT, February 6 – March 3, 1971. The work in the poster is also a “tuning fork” and is closely related to the one shown at the MIT Museum for the CAVS 50th Anniversary.
