Wen-ti Tsen was born in Shanghai, China to parents from two revolutionary families who overthrew the Qing Dynasty. They were rewarded with studies abroad in France, where they stayed for ten years: Tsen's father studied literature, and his mother was the first Chinese woman to graduate from the Beaux-Arts Academy. The two returned to a thriving 1920–30s Shanghai, but then war and revolution arrived. Tsen's father died, and his mother later moved her family to France. He grew up in Paris and London. In 1956, he began studying art in Florence and London. Later, he arrived to the US to study at the The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Upon graduating, he received a traveling fellowship and traveled for two years: by car from Paris to Karachi, and in Sri Lanka, Egypt, and Europe, painting and taking in the world.

Returning to the US, with the oncoming Vietnam War, Tsen became passionately involved with applying art to understanding colonialism and racial and class inequalities. A teaching job allowed him to live for three years in Beirut, which further deepened his awareness of global inequity. Upon returning to the US, he continued to make art that addressed social and class issues. He was committed to making a living as a union worker, first as a billboard painter and then, for thirty years, as a movie projectionist — a wage-earner in the flux of society's economics.

As time moved on, and political affinities splintered, Tsen drifted more and more into making art on Asian American issues and working people's lives.