Chinese-born, London-based artist Jacky Tsai brings his fashion-world experience to his interdisciplinary art projects, which often fuse illustration, printmaking, sewing and sculpture. Tsai says that he is fueled by his contrasting experiences living in both Eastern and Western cultures. With his skull sculptures (or “Skullptures” as Tsai refers to them) and illustrations, the artist combines the morbid with the ornate. These symbols of death and decay become the sites of regeneration as flowers blossom on the skulls like moss — a juxtaposition Tsai uses as an antidote to his native culture’s superstitions about death.
Tsai’s most iconic motif, his flower skull image was made famous when he designed a textile pattern for fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s spring/summer 2008 menswear collection. While the drawings and Skullptures are typically small-scale, Tsai recently created a 1.6-meter-long sculpture of a skull, which he embellished with individually-sewn leather flowers. After his work with McQueen, Tsai started his own eponymous luxury fashion line, Jacky Tsai, in 2011 and continues to create sculptures, installations and 2D work.
