Sara Tse was born in Hong Kong in 1974. Her 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. Once firing is complete, a delicate shell or imprint of the fabric is left, the result of the fluid porcelain slipping around the fibres of material before they disintegrate.

Tse's work challenges the reverence for objects made from porcelain, contrasting it with the throwaway culture of fashion and trends in Hong Kong. Her objects are powerful in their summoning of a ghostly presence; these items of clothing only hint at the objects from which they are made. Of her work Tse has said:

'My work is figurative . . . I am interested in its indexical relationship to the real. It is indexical because it is not exactly a copy; it represents the interstitial space within the real object. What excites me is that it is a kind of index that does not abstract, but rather embodies the real, (to) the extent that it is easily taken as the real.'(1)

1. Tse, Sara. Artist's statement <http://www.artbeatus.com/english.html>, viewed 18 February 2005.