21 WADE AVE #2 | TORONTO
Howie Tsui | A Click Track for Pugilists | 11 JAN - 22 FEB 2025
Scary Stories for Pugilists
These works on view are pierced with ‘scary stories’ that unfold across temporalities and geographies—taking their cue from Pu Songling’s Liaozhai [Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio], a collection of short stories from the Qing Dynasty that blurred the boundaries between everyday reality and the supernatural world, revealing the porous fabric connecting these realms. Pu’s tales were not intended to be frightening, though some could see them as implicitly criticizing societal problems of the day. Tsui’s series, A Click Track for Pugilists, is evocative of the colour plates that were produced for a 19th-century illustrated version of Pu’s anthology. Tsui situates his figures in the sets of the Shaw Brothers studio, one of Hong Kong’s largest film studios, tucked away in Clear Water Bay on the eastern coast of Hong Kong. The studio produced more than a thousand films from the 1960s until it was vacated in the early 2000s. The complex has remained abandoned for over twenty years, a ghostly monument to the ‘Golden Era’ of Hong Kong cinema, filled with fictional worlds from a mythic Hong Kong to San Francisco’s Chinatown. Renowned for its production of many wuxia classics – fictional portrayals of martial artists in Ancient China – the Studio provides an ongoing source of inspiration in Tsui’s practice. These new works on paper draw on these sources of inspiration to offer their own contemporary satirical stories of today’s hyperpolarised aggrievement culture.
Taking this cinematic obsession a bit further, we enter a room that recalls an unsettling chapter in our recent history. Conceived during the COVID pandemic, GIF Roulette is Tsui’s own take on the exuberant, escapist world of cinema that fuels his practice. The work offers portals into a visual buffet of imagery, as well as a conduit into a moment when Tsui’s appetite for cinema was activated as a young child growing up outside of Hong Kong in the 1980s. According to theorist Ackbar Abbas, despite Hong Kong’s growing affluence, the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 (affirming Hong Kong’s return to China through a 50-year handover period commencing in 1997) followed by the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 confirmed many people’s fears that the Hong Kong way of life, with its mixture of colonialist and democratic trappings, was in imminent danger of disappearing, thus sparking a rejection of the idea of Hong Kong as a ‘cultural desert’ and instead ushering in an embrace of Hong Kong culture. This moment gave rise to Hong Kong cinema’s golden age, with television programmes and films that were being rapidly produced and circulated more widely around the world through new technologies. GIF Roulette brings together a cacophony of scenes from this era alongside more contemporary imagery that, when united, resemble the chaotic vignettes that can be found in Tsui’s works that depict Hong Kong’s dense architectural scenes, such as Jumbo, where each frame is packed with visual information, overwhelming and stimulating the imagination.
Our next tale takes us aboard the aforementioned ghost ship, an iconic floating restaurant that was moored in Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Harbour for almost 50 years. Created in the style of a Ming dynasty imperial palace, the
restaurant’s lavish design was incredibly evocative. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, it became a popular
attraction alongside this rise in the embrace of a uniquely Hong Kong culture, even featuring in several blockbuster films–rather fitting, as it was very much a stage set in itself. However, in 2020, the pandemic sealed its fate, and it was towed out to the South China Sea to await purchase by a new owner. A few days later, and perhaps due to more cynical motivations, it capsized at sea, offering an uncanny metaphor for the happier times in Hong Kong’s history that predated the pro-democracy protests and the COVID pandemic. It is across a meticulously crafted reconstruction of this ship that Tsui’s operatic scene unfolds, offering a chilling afterlife for Jumbo.
Our final ‘scary story’ appears in Malingerers, Skulkers and Dupes and is grounded in Tsui’s tongue-in-cheek approach to his subject matter. Produced for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s bicentennial commemoration of the War of 1812, we begin by entering the world of the heroic. But this abject story dismantles our tidy assumptions of such a figure, instead imagining a scene of antiheroes mutilating themselves through injury and illness to avoid going to battle. Using the iconography of war panoramas and recalling wuxia principles of subverting oppressors, Tsui reverses these heroes’ destinies, celebrating the myriad of war-like tactics employed to outwit their own British colonial forces. Forces, who, in parallel to the War of 1812, were making their first serious drug-fuelled forays into the South China Sea, ultimately leading to the First Opium War and the ceding of Hong Kong to the British a few decades later.
Claire Shea
Howie Tsui (徐浩恩, b. 1978, Hong Kong) is based on unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver). His multi-disciplinary practice spans ink brush painting, sound sculpture, lenticular light box and installation. Tsui constructs tense, fictive environments that undermine revered art forms and narrative genres, often stemming from the Chinese literati tradition. He employs a stylized form of derisive and exaggerated imagery as a way to satirize and disarm broadening regimes and their programs of cultural hegemony. The most notable branch of his practice involves the use of algorithmic animation sequences to raise questions around order, chaos and the potential of social harmony through self-organized societies. Tsui synthesizes diverging socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, trauma, surveillance and otherness through a distinctly outsider lens to cast light onto liminal and diasporic experiences.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Hanart TZ (Hong Kong, 2024), Glenbow Museum (2023), The Power Plant (2020); with group exhibitions at the Macao International Art Biennale, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), Art Gallery of New South Wales. Public collections include: National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, McMichael Art Collection. Tsui was awarded the Joseph Stauffer Prize (2005), and long-listed forthe Sobey Award (2018). He holds a BFA from the University of Waterloo.
Claire Shea is a curator based in Toronto. She is part of the curatorial team for the forthcoming inaugural edition of the Walk&Talk biennial in the Azores (2025). From 2022 to 2024, she was the Director of Fogo Island Arts, where she curated exhibitions and programs, including ‘Meltwater,’ the Labrador Current Foodways residency and Liam Gillick’s ‘A Variability Quantifier.’ From 2017 to 2021, she was Deputy Director at Para Site, Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of Asia’s oldest and most active independent art institutions, where she co-curated the major group exhibition 'An Opera for Animals,' which toured to Rockbund Art Museum in 2019. From 2008 to 2016, she was Curatorial Director at Cass Sculpture Foundation, where she curated ‘A Beautiful Disorder,’ the UK’s first major exhibition of outdoor sculpture by contemporary artists from Greater China. In 2014, she was Associate Curator for the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial, ‘We Have Never Participated.’
The exhibition was made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.