Sarah Sze

Sarah’s great-grandfather, who had a waist-length queue, was the first Chinese student (Alfred Sao-ke Sze) to go to Cornell University. He became China’s minister to Britain and then ambassador to the United States. Her father, Chia-Ming Sze, was born in Shanghai; his family fled China when he was four, and resettled in the United States. He became an architect and married Judy Mossman, an Anglo-Scottish-Irish schoolteacher. Sarah and David, her older brother, grew up in Boston. (David, one of the first investors in Facebook, is a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners.) Sarah went to Milton Academy as a day student and graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1991. Throughout her childhood, she was constantly drawing—at the dinner table, on the train, wherever she was.

On January 1, 2017, a permanent installation commissioned by MTA Arts & Design of drawings by Sze on ceramic tiles opened in the 96th Street subway station on the new Second Avenue Subway line in New York City.

Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, to build large scale installations. She uses everyday items like string, Q-tips, photographs, and wire to create complex constellations whose forms change with the viewer's interaction. The effect of this is to "challenge the very material of sculpture, the very constitution of sculpture, as a solid form that has to do with finite geometric constitutions, shapes, and content." When selecting materials, Sze focuses on the exploration of value acquisition–what value the object holds and how it is acquired. In an interview with curator Okwui Enwezor, Sze explained that during her conceptualization process, she will "choreograph the experience to create an ebb and flow of information [...] thinking about how people approach, slow down, stop, perceive [her art]."

Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. Her work has been featured in The Whitney Biennial (2000), the Carnegie International (1999) and several international biennials, including Berlin (1998), Guangzhou (2015), Liverpool (2008), Lyon (2009), São Paulo (2002), and Venice (1999, 2013, and 2015).

Sarah Sze (/ˈ z iː / ; born 1969) is a contemporary artist known for sculpture and installation works that employ everyday objects to create multimedia landscapes. Sze's work explores the role of technology and information in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials. Drawing from Modernist traditions, Sze's work often represents objects caught in suspension. Sze lives and works in New York City and is a professor of visual arts at Columbia University.

Sze was born in Boston in 1969. Her father was an architect. Sze attributes her approach to seeing the world to growing up around models and plans and to regular discussions of buildings and cities. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from New York's School of Visual Arts in 1997.