Howie Tsui: Retainers of Anarchy

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Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy," 2017

key frame drawing for algorithmic animation sequence, courtesy of the artist. Photo by Maegan Hill-Carroll, Vancouver Art Gallery

Howie Tsui’s tour de force exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a collaboration with the Ottawa Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is a fascinating fusion of characters and tropes from the world of wuxia – Chinese martial arts fantasy fiction – with events from Hong Kong history and politics. Vancouver-based Tsui, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and Thunder Bay, Ont., has long investigated themes from Asian popular culture and history. Whether referencing ghost stories, ancient cosmology and bestiaries, Hokusai’s manga drawings, or erotic Shunga paintings, Tsui’s abiding interest has been how these narratives have relevance to contemporary socio-political events. He explores these themes from the vantage point of a Western-educated Hong Kongese whose knowledge of his native culture came initially from movies and television. As he explains, wuxia was “very popular within the Chinese diaspora because, for many of us, you become disconnected with your culture, beyond the domestic applications of language and home cuisine.”

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Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy," 2017

key frame drawing for algorithmic animation sequence,courtesy of the artist.

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Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy," 2017

key frame drawing for algorithmic animation sequence,courtesy of the artist.

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Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy," 2017

key frame drawing for algorithmic animation sequence,courtesy of the artist

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The journey through Tsui’s exhibition, Retainers of Anarchy, on view until May 28, begins in a dark gallery with the sound sculpture Hei Gung Deviation, a wooden structure built to resemble a kung fu training dummy. Motion sensors trigger percussive tapping, mimicking the sound martial artists make when training on wooden dummies. Burnt into the surface of the wood are Tsui’s characteristic grotesqueries, drawings of monstrous and exaggerated faces, animals and objects that represent a visual catalogue of martial arts techniques.

Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy," 2017

Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy," 2017

Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy," 2017

The next gallery displays the signature work, an 80-foot long animated scroll that bears the same title as the exhibition. To create the animation sequence, Tsui produced hundreds of drawings that were then digitized, animated and combined with a sound track excerpted from martial arts television shows. The result is a complex, layered, mesmerizing, non-linear narrative of outlaw worlds of social protest, civil disobedience and alternative societal structures. Martial arts heroes and villains engage in battles and rituals against a mountainous landscape, a woman from Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement fends off bullets emanating from a loudspeaker, and residents of the self-governing Kowloon Walled City (a dense enclave that housed over 33,000 residents before being demolished in 1994), are seen in a cutaway section engaged in myriad activities such as sleeping, eating, fighting, slicing meat, making noodles, visiting the dentist and playing mahjong. Tsui’s absorbing scroll is not without relevance to Vancouver, for he sees Kowloon Walled City as a metaphor for Vancouver’s Chinatown, a site born out of self-organization, but also a site of erasure.