[1] Sze's work explores the role of technology, information, and memory with objects in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials.
Her father, Chia-Ming Sze, was an architect who moved to the United States from Shanghai at age four and her mother, Judy Mossman, was an Anglo-Scottish-Irish schoolteacher.
[4] She attended Milton Academy as a day student and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Architecture and Painting from Yale University in 1991.
[7] Sze has created public artworks for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Walker Art Center, and the High Line in New York.
[7] Sze is a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and was granted a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award in 1999.
For her 2023 exhibition called Timelapse at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Sze created a series of site-specific installations through the Frank Lloyd Wright building.
Tabish Khan, when reviewing the exhibition for Culture Whisper wrote “this installation fills us with a sense of awe”.
[citation needed] Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found objects, to build large-scale installations.
[20] The incorporation of these "low value" objects rejects the traditional standard that sculptures have to be solid, limited in geometric shapes, and work with specific materials.
This can be displayed with Sze's intentional inclusion of the unseen process materials (ladders, clips, wooden poles, etc.
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].
In her works like Timekeeper, Sze Creates a time capsule,[26] allowing her to directly connect with the objects she utilized with the piece to the year.
With her Storm King Art Center permanent commission, Fallen Sky creates the infusion and disintegration of the extra-terrestrial material to become one with the ground.
[32] Other outside installations like Still Life with Landscape take into consideration the natural habitat and include those needs with the structure, creating a seamless interconnection with the composition of the work.