Susan Tsu: Outfitting a vision

A legend in contemporary costume design, Susan Tsu says her dual cultural heritage works to her advantage, Niu Yue reports from New York

Going beyond the ordinary is something Susan Tsu has been consistently doing for years, not only as a costume designer but also as an educator.

"My generation, in coming of age, was the first to be labeled the type-A super-achieving Chinese American," she wrote in her bio. "We were driven in part by Confucianism, a strong component of which was filial and ancestral piety, and in part by the unquestionable expectation that the sacrifices and standards of our parents dictated our own performance standards.

"Working harder and forsaking individual pleasure for the greater good was deeply culturally ingrained," she wrote.

On May 20 in New York, Tsu was presented with a lifetime achievement honor at the TDF/ Irene Sharaff Awards ceremony - awards founded in 1993 to pay tribute to the art of costume design and presented through the Theatre Development Fund's costume collection.

"Extraordinary is the one word I would use to describe Susan Tsu," said award presenter Edward Stern. "What's amazing about Susan is she is an extraordinary designer and an extraordinary artist and most of all an extraordinary human being,"

Tsu was born at Penn State University, where her mother, who was born in Hong Kong, was pursuing a master's degree and her father, from Shanghai, was teaching.

As a first generation immigrant born in the US, Tsu had been thoroughly taught about her Chinese heritage and Chinese principles by her parents.

When Tsu went to school, she was the only Chinese person in the entire school district of Pittsburg. Tsu remembered that while most of her friends were having fun after school or over the weekends, she was studying in a Chinese language school.

"My parents brought me up to be bi-lingual but Chinese was my first tongue and even as I learned about Chinese traditions, I came to know America as 'The Beautiful Country', which is how it translates from Chinese to English," Tsu said.

Tsu's interest in theater arts came from her parents as well, as he mother exposed her to a variety of art forms from an early age.

Tsu studied set and costume design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where, again, she was the first Chinese student.

"While I cannot be certain that others feel the same way, I like to think that bringing the sensibilities of two cultures to the table has enriched my collaborations," Tsu said.

Over the past 45 years, Tsu has worked with 45 major regional theater and opera companies in the US and her costumes have also been seen in Europe, Asia and the Pacific Rim.

In 1993, Tsu designed costumes for the stage version of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, a first-time collaboration between Chinese and American theater companies - the Long Wharf Theater and Shanghai People's Art Theatre.

"I did the play of The Joy Luck Club with (set designer) Ming Cho Lee," she said. "It was very exciting. We worked alongside our Chinese colleagues, which was a great honor for us. It was a big deal in China at the time because it was the first collaboration of its kind."

Highlights of her career include costumes for the original Broadway production of Godspell, as well as Pop, The Task, The Greeks, Dracula: A Musical Nightmare and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Along the way she has also garnered a New York Drama Desk Award, New York Drama Critics Award, Los Angeles Distinguished Designer Award and a Kennedy Center Medal of Achievement.

Tsu said that being a Chinese American allows her to work from a unique perspective.

"Like the costumes I designed for King Lear at the Cincinnati Playhouse. Those clothes are inspired by Chinese and Mongolian costumes," Tsu said.

Tsu said she hasn't necessarily gravitated to Chinese companies that are in America but very much focused on establishing a career in the American mainstream.

"While I have a unique understanding of what it means to be Asian, I do not believe that only Asian designers can do Asian plays, just as I do not believe that British designers are the only people in the world who can bring meaning to Shakespeare," Tsu said.

"I believe a good designer has the ability to take on the skins of many cultures and can immerse herself in many situations, which she in fact has not experienced," Tsu added.

"How many of us have actually murdered a king or eaten our children? How many Western designers have made Turandot come to life? And conversely how many Asian designers have tackled the Western classics?" she said.

"I want to be seen as a designer and citizen of the world first, and not be labeled as an Asian-American designer alone," Tsu wrote in her bio.

More recently, Tsu took the job of co-curator of the current international exhibit Costume Design at the Turn of the Century: 1990-2015, which opened at the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow in June of 2015 and later toured to the US and China.

Tsu holds both a BFA and MFA from CMU, where she now teaches as the Bessie F. Anathan Professor of Costume Design. She previously headed the costume programs at Boston University (1983 to 1991) and the University of Texas at Austin (1991 to 2003).

"I work very hard because I tell myself what I do might be helpful for a large community not just myself. So actually my teaching work allows it to happen more than my design work. Also they both inform each other," Tsu said.

Cumulatively, Tsu has taught 96 MFA costume designers and hundreds of undergraduate designers that would go into the profession.

Today, with more and more young Chinese students coming to the US to embrace higher education, the program Tsu teaches enrolled 16 Asian students from overseas.

"The educational system in both countries is very strong but very different, for instance, my students who come from China are fantastically disciplined, the top of their classes, they are very diligent and they paint beautifully and even are able to mimic a variety of different kinds of artists and their painting styles," Tsu said.

"But because they are so diligent, because they've been trained the Chinese way to be very polite, to listen carefully, the harder thing for them to understand is that we want to hear how they feel about the issues of the world, we want to know how they really feel on the inside," Tsu said.

"As educators, we have an enormous responsibility. We form the future of our own field by training tomorrow's theater artists. We teach technique, process, and skills but do we adequately address the cultures and theater of the world and within our country? So many voices and visions in the cultural richness of the United States have yet to find expression," said Tsu.

(China Daily USA 06/03/2016 page11)