Wedged between a sushi restaurant and a dollar goods stall in Manhattan's Chinatown are a set of gray metal doors and a plastic buzzer discreetly labelled “Kiang Malingue”. The gallery’s new fourth-floor space in New York echoes their flagship setting in Hong Kong: an eclectic mix of Eastern rebellion against often-antiseptic Western conventions. Lorraine Kiang, partner to Edouard Malingue in business and in life, says they chose this neighborhood for their New York outpost because of its character and its proximity to community members they wish to build ties with. "It’s footsteps away from great cafes and dumpling shops, walking distance to the New Museum, Drawing Center, Artists Space, 99 Canal, Maxwell Graham and Miguel Abreu… It remains an area that is very authentic and stimulating for creativity."

The soaring white walls of the gallery are flanked by sunlit windows on both ends, a rarity in the dense neighborhood, facing a skyline dotted with a view of a handball court, the One World Trade Center, and a scattering of luxury condominiums. "Brook Hsu showed us a listing of the space," Kiang explains. "We flew to New York shortly after and fell in love with the luminosity, the aura of the space, the wooden floor beaten up by time. The area and our space feel understated, yet full of life and juice. We are upstairs, which requires word of mouth to find us." It's this embrace of, and assimilation to, Chinatown's oddities—like taking care not to be a flashy, fluorescent blight on the street level, which are often spurned by local activists—that has quietly made the gallery a new cool kid on the block. 

Tseng notes the difficulty of introducing his work to foreign audiences in any other way than bridging Eastern and Western divides, which—as with many artists working in Asia—has become a bit of a cliché. When traversing continents, he has begun to anticipate dominant Western narratives that place Europe at the center of the world's compass. Meanwhile, local viewers don't think of his work as necessarily Asian or East Asian, Tseng says. Instead, they might connect more strongly with its themes of queerness, of the body, or a variety of other textual readings. When exhibiting in Japan, Tseng recalls viewers insisting on the works' Japanese influences. "They just put my work in some territory, as they want. And I'm open to it. I mean, it's okay to let the audience have their own projections." 

He further reflects that this mentality, of being at peace with cultural amalgamation, is owed to being a native of Taiwan. Like his dealer's home city of Hong Kong, the island of Taiwan carries a long history of being a pawn in contentious geopolitics. "Taiwan, basically, was in the middle of many things... This kind of complication is my reality, and I adore it, actually," Tseng says. "I don't need to tell people exactly what I am."

Tseng thus enjoys being a shapeshifter and experimenting with the reception of his work as it travels or meets new audiences. He plans to develop a new body of work during a residency at the artist-run studio 99 Canal this spring, just steps away from Kiang Malingue, to show at Independent. Tseng has expanded beyond figuration to instead focus on different parts of the body in effort to challenge himself and viewers to read emotion without relying on facial expressions, which he believes have become almost too easy to interpret. Whereas body language or hands, Tseng says, can be "a manifestation of our desire and our will. It could be violent, it could be kindness. It could be sexual, it could be vicious, it could be many things."

Perhaps the geography of New York and its reputation for sexual freedom have left an impression on Tseng, who was emboldened to paint male genitalia for his stateside debut. Some of his works-in-progress depict circumcised and uncircumcised penises, colored with the most beautiful deep rose blush at the tip. "It's a body part," Tseng states candidly. 

And against the roaring fabric of downtown, Tseng's work promises to again adopt new meaning from its surroundings. One might recognize the half-lidded faces in his work, once referencing Buddhist depictions of religious trance, in the nonchalant attitudes vogue to nearby cafes, skate parks, or karaoke joints.