PATEL BROWN GALLERY | 21 WADE AVE

Howie Tsui | A Prologue to Entombment

March 26 - May 7 2022

Patel Brown is pleased to present Howie Tsui’s A Prologue to Entombment. Howie Tsui constructs tense, fictive environments that subvert venerated practices from the Chinese literati tradition. Tsui synthesizes socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, trauma, surveillance, and otherness to advocate for liminal and diasporic experiences. Tsui’s Avatars of Entombment, a new series of works on paper, examines the funerary ritual of returning bones to one’s hometown as an allegory for migrant experiences and diasporic yearning. This combines with explorations into the mounting suppression of voice as expressed through depictions of figures entombed within scholar rocks, referencing the Chinese practice of using cangues as a form of punishment and furthering Tsui’s ongoing strategies to destabilize canonized objects.