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Tse-Wen Tsao is a Taiwanese Baltimore-based visual artist working with photography and expanded image-making practices. Her work investigates how the invisible systems shape contemporary life, landscapes and human experience.
Growing up in Taiwan in proximity to the semiconductor industry and later living across Mainland China, the Tibetan Plateau, and the United States, Tsao developed a perspective shaped by moving across different cultural and political contexts. Her practice examines how large-scale systems are experienced differently across cultures and communities, revealing the tensions between technological progress, political narratives, and lived realities.
Through staged and constructed photography, documentary approaches, aerial imagery, and alternative photographic processes, Tsao explores the visible and invisible consequences of development, from renewable energy infrastructures in Beneath the Grid to cultural narratives of migration and belonging in The American Dream: Or Was That Just a Movie?. Her ongoing work considers how global systems transform the environments we inhabit and the ways we imagine our futures.
Tsao holds a BFA in Cinematography from the Communication University of China and an MFA in Photography + Media & Society from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in Baltimore at venues including Gormley Gallery at Notre Dame of Maryland University and The Crow’s Nest Gallery, and featured in publications such as BmoreArt and VoyageBaltimore. She is a member of the American Society of Media Photographers and the Society for Photographic Education.
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