[4][5][6] She explores conceptual themes including plasticity, multiplicity and multi-dimensional thinking, balancing attention to the physical attributes of raw materials, craft, form and socio-political issues such as global mobility, social negotiation and sustainability.

[23][37][31] Critics such as Artforum's Ralph Rugoff note in her work a "conceptual agility [and] formal inventiveness" that "collapses all kinds of seemingly contradictory elements": micro and macro, organic and industrial, machined and handmade, subject and object, natural and cultural, literal and metaphorical.

[28][39] In her early work (roughly 1995–2006), Tse focused on synthetic plastics as a medium, using the ubiquitous, malleable material to interweave contemporary concepts ranging from urban development and 20th-century changeability and mobility to her own bicultural identity as an Asian woman living in the United States.

"[4] Tse's exhibition "Polytocous" (2002) featured what Artforum called "proliferating, self-consuming nonpaintings": minimal but painterly, 48" square wall panels of cut, excised, twisted and sutured pieces of pastel polyethylene-vinyl acetate (PEVA) that evoked surrogate skins, prosthetic devices and motherboard circuitry.

[37][48][2][9] Her exhibition "Sink Like a Submarine" (2007) drew unexpected connections between forms, raw materials and processes associated with military weaponry, handicraft and the loom, the industrial revolution and information systems.

The show's title assemblage bore a human heart of carved jade both cradled and caged in a small tower (made of cast replicas of recovered submarine parts) that resembled a booby-trap land mine.

"[48] The wide-ranging sculpture-installations have employed maps, fabric, music stands, stones, text and video in explorations of multidimensional identity and experience that drew upon quantum theory, the history of colonial trade, and both personal and Chinese diasporic stories.

[25][54] In her exhibition inspired by Oscar Wilde's children's tale "The Happy Prince" ("Lift Me Up So I Can See Better," 2016), Tse considered multiple perspectives, hope, sadness and the possibility of change through two quasi-figurative, interrelated groups of handcrafted sculpture.

[2][11][39] Tse's site-responsive installation for 58th Venice Biennale, "Stakeholders" (2019)—and a significantly reworked version, "Stakes and Holders" at M+ (2020)—centered on themes of accommodation, interdependency, plurality, improvised play and contemporary life in the 21st century.

[31][54][9] After Tse relocated to Lompoc, CA during the COVID-19 pandemic, she turned more intently to the theme of sustainability, in both an ecological sense (she used no store-bought materials) and economic sense—as a conceptual choice she priced the work based on her studio rental cost, shifting the focus from commodity to the conditions necessary to make art.

[10] Her resulting exhibition, "Lompoc Stories" (2022), presented a video and nine sculptures made with materials gleaned from her new environs (which included a space base, oil field and prison) that meld the natural with the human-made: cat fur, snake skin, diatomite, fiber optics, a helmet and a basement window, among other things.