Tseng was truly a citizen of the world. After spending his childhood in Hong Kong, Tseng moved to Canada with his family at the age of 16. He later studied photography and painting in Paris before finally settling down in New York in 1978. He quickly found a home in the artistic underground of the East Village, forming close circles with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel. And it was in New York that the legend of Tseng Kwong Chi was created. The story goes that during one fateful visit from his parents, Tseng and his sister were to attend a dinner at a high-end restaurant, which had a dress code. Tseng, at this time, did not own a suit, so he improvised and donned a Mao suit that he had purchased by chance from a thrift shop in Montreal. While his parents, who were Nationalists, were unimpressed by Tseng’s choice of attire, upon seeing Tseng in his Mao suit the restaurant’s maître d’ allegedly treated him like a Chinese dignitary—a VIP. In this moment, his artistic persona, the “Ambiguous Ambassador,” was formed.

The black-and-white photographs from the “Expeditionary” series portray Tseng posing in front of various iconic monuments and architecture in both the United States and Europe. He was intrigued by the notion of world travel, the clash of Eastern and Western cultures, and inspired by postmodern artists such as Andy Warhol, who believed that, in the future, everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. Tseng set off to cultivate his own persona: an Asian-American world-traveller, which was a particularly important identity in an era where in China—the land of his ancestral heritage—the ordinary national could not travel outside of the country.

Each photograph from the series is carefully staged. In a short, intimate documentary created in collaboration with filmmaker Christine Lombard, we see Tseng in action as he travels with his camera and tools from one site to the next. Here, we also see the magic of his photography come to fruition. For Tseng, wearing the reflective glasses allowed him to assume a desired “surrealistic quality.” In an attempt to express “the mystery still surrounding China” at the time, Tseng purposely looked away from the camera, conveying a cool and distant attitude. In a print entitled New York, New York (1979), Tseng makes clear the presence of the camera’s cable release in order to emphasize that his fictional identity is a performance.

There is a certain allure to Tseng’s photography. He toys with the familiarity of the tourist snapshot, displacing recognizable frames of reference by distorting the scale and proportion of the self in relation to the iconic tourist sites—which included the Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco, California, 1979) and the Eiffel Tower (Paris, France, 1983). Tseng inscribed upon these locations a paradoxical narrative of his own Asian-American identity and the foreignness of Chinese tourists in the Western world.

In the later years of the “Expeditionary” series, Tseng played with another familiar concept; ditching the cable release, he photographed himself amongst the wilderness of the world’s great landscapes. No longer confined to the interaction between the East and West, his landscape photographs takes him as far as Japan, as in Oshima, Japan (1988), taken only two years before his untimely death. His landscapes portray a quieter, more meditative time, referencing classical Western paintings such as that of Caspar David Friedrich, or Ansel Adams’s wild photographs of the American West. In Tseng’s images, the artist is photographed as a tiny figure within a much larger plane. With these images, Tseng pulls away from the power and glory of the (Western) constructed world and returns his focus to the uncontrolled beauty of nature.

Tseng believed art to be a universal language, an act that could bring people together. People who knew the artist perceived him to be the opposite of his steely, “Ambiguous Ambassador” persona. Tseng is remembered fondly by friends, acquaintances and loved ones as a joyous and risk-taking person with a flamboyant personality. His photographs are engaging, because they explore the never-ending questions and issues associated with the representation of the “self.” They resonate with the contemporary cultural phenomenon of the “selfie”—an obsession with documenting one’s self-image. In the foreword to the exhibition catalog of “Citizen of the World,” Muna writes, “[Tseng] taught me that there was a bigger world out there and it was there for the taking.” Tseng was truly a “witness” of his time, and through his photographs we, in turn, are able to experience his world, his time, his East Village, his America—and perhaps this is the ultimate legacy that he has left us.

Tseng Kwong Chi’s “Citizen of the World” is on view at Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong, until January 24, 2015.