Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Painting, Digital Art, Installation, Books & Zines, Performance, Design
Website: helentseng.com
Helen Shewolfe Tseng (she/they/wolf) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, naturalist, and creative coder based in San Francisco. Born to Taiwanese immigrants in the Deep South, Tseng brings a diasporic and ancestral lens to a practice that spans works on paper, books and zines, games, ritual objects, installations, participatory events, and browser-based computational works.
Tseng has received numerous Bay Area fellowships and residencies, including a 2025 Leonardo@Djerassi Art+Science Residency, a 2023–24 San Francisco Arts Commission grant, and a 2018–2019 YBCA Fellowship at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They have also been in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, and Gray Area, and have lectured at Stanford University and the University of San Francisco.
In 2024, Tseng joined the editorial collective of Taper, a browser-based journal of computational poetry. Their book The Astrological Grimoire: Timeless Horoscopes, Modern Rituals, and Creative Altars for Self-Discovery, co-authored and illustrated with Beatrix Gravesguard, was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Since 2014, they have co-hosted Astral Projection Radio Hour on BFF.fm, San Francisco’s community radio station.
Tseng’s practice emerges from the crossroads of mythology, ecology, and technology. Coyotes and wild canids appear throughout her work as narrative portals into questions of power, land, myth, migration, and environmental precarity — a focus deepened by her work as an urban wildlife naturalist since 2019. Folk spiritual traditions, trickster archetypes, interspecies entanglement, and neurodivergence shape an approach that moves fluidly between the tactile and the digital.
Recent works include meditative browser-based experiences such as AXIS MUNDI: 狐仙 (2022), in which a many-tailed fox spirit drawn from ancestral cosmology guides viewers through a calming audiovisual loop, and straw dogs (2025), a microgame-poem inspired by the Taoist concept of ceremonial animal substitutes, which places players inside a simplified digital ecosystem to experience the unintended consequences of their actions.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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