Wen-Ying Tsai (Chinese: 蔡文穎; pinyin: Cài Wényǐng; Wade–Giles: Ts'ai Wen-ying; October 13, 1928 – January 2, 2013) was a Chinese-American pioneer cybernetic sculptor and kinetic artist best known for creating sculptures using electric motors, stainless steel rods, stroboscopic light, and audio feedback control.

[5][6] Moving to New York City after graduation,[6] Tsai began working as an architectural engineer[6] for clients such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Synergetics, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

[7] While working as an engineer by day, Tsai pursued artistic studies at the Art Students League at night, while also taking courses in political science and economics at the New School for Social Research.

[6] In 1963, Tsai won a John Hay Whitney Fellowship for Painting, after which he decided to leave engineering and devote himself full-time to the arts.

[9] After a three-month trip in Europe, he returned to New York and began to make three-dimensional constructions using optical effects, fluorescent paints, and ultra-violet light.

These works were later selected for The Responsive Eye, an exhibition curated by William Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Art historian Sam Hunter described the work: Tsai's Multi-kinetics were dynamically integrated multiple constructions, employing thirty-two kinetic units, each of which contains a configuration of multi-colored gyroscopic forms.

By controlling the time sequence of each unit in skillful compositions, Tsai used engineering principles to achieve aesthetic ends.

While contemplating the sunlight shimmering in the trees, he had a sudden inspiration to use his engineering background to create art work that replicates natural phenomena.

His first "feedback" pieces were shown in an important and original show in 1968 at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, an exhibition called Cybernetic Sculpture.

competition, and was selected by Pontus Hulten, the guest curator, for his mammoth international exhibition entitled Machine as seen at the End of the Mechanical Age held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

[1] In the early 1970s, Tsai moved with his family to Paris and showed with the Denise René Gallery and had extensive exhibitions in Europe.

During these years, he befriended fellow Chinese artists residing in Paris including Peng Wan-Ts and Chu Teh-Chun and became very passionate about cultural exchange between China and the West.

In 1979, Tsai and his friend the composer Wen-chung Chou were part of the first delegation of artists from the US to the People's Republic of China.

Art critic Robert Hughes evokes them vividly: A grove of slender stainless-steel rods rises from a plate.

The rods appear to move; there is a shimmering, a flashing, an eerie ballet of metal, whose apparent movements range from stillness to jittering, and back to a slow, indescribably sensuous undulation[15] The philosopher Vilem Flusser wrote of Tsai's work: There can be no doubt that Tsai is a great artist.

Not because what he does is pleasant, or because he proposes a play, or because he represents the spirit of our times, but because he reveals to us, through artifice or works of art, the concrete experience of a future full of promise or abysmal danger.

That is why an artist like Tsai is likely to be so valuable; not because he is an innovator (all his techniques taken separately have been used before) but because he has the kind of authority that establishes a stylistic tradition.

The slender, stainless steel "cybernetic" rods of his sculpture vibrate in different patterns in response to electronic impulses, to the clapping of human hands, or to the flashes of a strobe light.

[18]Frank Popper elaborates: As far as the sensory experience of the spectator goes, the most outstanding American kinetic artist is unquestionably the Chinese-born Wen-Ying Tsai.

In this case Tsai may say that his is an important Oriental contribution to the Western (and bankrupt) attempt to free man from the determining effects of objects of culture.

[16]Art historian Donald Kuspit finds in Tsai's art a Taoist outlook: Previous discussions of Tsai's work have concentrated on its technology and its place in the development of modern art/ I want to concentrate on its Weltanschauung or inner point of view, which has been completely neglected in every discussion, not doubt because it transcends modernity, indeed, subverts it by subsuming it.

Tsai's ultramodern technology is a means of expressing a consistent, fundamental attitude to life, which his cybernetic sculptures literally embody.

[22] The Tsai family spent part of the 1970s in Paris before settling down permanently in SoHo, New York where they lived in a loft space that they renovated themselves.

[1][2] He was survived by his wife Pei-De; sons and spouses Lun-Yi London (Michelle) and Ming-Yi Gyorgy (Marloes); grandchildren Sakhaya, Kelsyn, Lina, Flora and Nereus.

National Academy of Science, Washington, DC 1968 "Cybernetic Serendipity", Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

"Explorations", Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 3e Salon International des Galeries Pilotes, Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts, Lausanne Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris.

"Multiple Interaction Team", Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago "Salon International des Composants Electroniques", Paris.

Robert Hughes, "Shaped by Strobe", Time (October 2) 1973 H. Dufrenne, "L'Art en Occident", Le Coumer, UNESCO (March).

1994 Mu Ling, "Tsai's Cybernetic Art", Ming Pao Monthly (January), Hong Kong.