Pop Culture to Power

Howie Tsui Speaks at the Ringling

By Sylvia Whitman

In Howie Tsui’s Retainers of Anarchy, which makes its U.S. debut at The Ringling this month, kung fu meets traditional Chinese scroll painting in a multimedia work both subversive and playful. A computer algorithm constantly remixes Tsui’s hand-drawn scenes, put in motion by a team of animators and set to music by collaborator Remy Siu. Viewers step into a darkened gallery where five projectors cast an ever-shifting 25-meter visual narrative on the wall. Although Tsui says he hasn’t met enough of his American audience to predict the reaction, the Vancouver-based artist expects a range of responses.

“But I guarantee, the first one will be wonder,” he says.

Retainers of Anarchy germinated on Tsui’s honeymoon. Born in Hong Kong and raised in its diaspora, he returned to the city for the first time in 2010, with his wife. An uncle arranged tickets to a touring exhibit of The River of Wisdom, China’s World Expo hit, a massive animated version of a historic Song dynasty scroll that required 18 projectors. It was “quite the spectacle upon first witnessing it,” Tsui says. Upon reflecting, however, he found its “very harmonious and idealized portraiture of society” unsettling, particularly in semi-autonomous Hong Kong “at a time when a lot of locals are feeling quite uneasy about what the future is going to look like.”

A painter and illustrator who graduated from Canada’s Waterloo University with a BFA in 2002, Tsui was already garnering attention for his Asian-themed mashups, such as Of Manga and Mongrels. And he always had a desire to see his images move and to translate them into other mediums. He had experimented with folksy magic lantern projectors, but The River of Wisdom inspired him to think big—and rebellious.

“I am replicating the spectacle aspect of the work I saw at the World Pavilion,” Tsui says. “What I was trying to do was skewer that form of presentation or have a satirical critique of that format, animating historical images.”

How to subvert highbrow propaganda? Stir in some popular culture. 

Growing up a global nomad, Tsui had watched a lot of martial art historical fantasy, a genre known in Mandarin as wuxia. “For me in the Hong Kong diaspora, living in a very isolated part of Canada, those TV shows and films constructed a fictional identity or an imagined idea of Chineseness.” Wuxia celebrates the underdog hero beholden to no one. (Think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the 2000 Academy Award nominated film.) Researching wuxia, Tsui discovered that mainland China had banned or restricted the genre during the 20th century, driving many writers to more liberal Taiwan and Hong Kong. “I’m playing with that genre,” Tsui says, “and seeing that it’s quite loaded.” 

Don’t expect a linear narrative, however. The algorithm switches up images nonstop. Canadian art historian Alice Ming Wai Jim has described Retainers of Anarchy as a “ a virtual built environment … [with] no beginning or end.” At its heart rises a cutaway alluding to Kowloon Walled City, an ungoverned settlement demolished by Hong Kong authorities in the 1990s. Contrasting with domestic scenes inside the high-rise is a landscape full of ghosts, good and bad guys, and all manner of fringe characters, including a Hong Kong bookseller who mysteriously disappeared during recent protests. Students of Chinese art will recognize nods to Song dynasty handscrolls and bandit stories.

Tsui says he’s been grappling with audience. Certainly, viewers familiar with some of the context will have a deeper read on the multilayered images. “But I think the work can stand by itself formally.”

He points to how “the idea of liminality, or in-betweenness” from the martial arts universe surfaces in Retainers of Anarchy. “It’s like the Wild, Wild West—no rules.” Tsui links that to the diasporic experience “and identity that wavers in between boundaries of definition.” In martial arts movies, the outsider often resists authority—sticks it to the man, if you will. Kung fu films had a huge following in Western marginalized communities, says Tsui, because wuxia “portrayed something different that they could root for.” 

Now a father of two, Tsui is thinking ever more deeply about the “geopolitical ping-ponging of history” and the “fuzzy edges” of identity. He speaks Cantonese to his son but hasn’t signed him up for language classes. They watch films, listen to music, eat Chinese food. The Hong Kong of his youth grafted British colonialism onto Chinese roots in a soil rich with international influences. “I approach identity with my kids in a similar hybrid, mishmashy, kaleidoscopic, inverted prismatic way,” Tsui says. At the same time, though, he’s “concerned about cultural preservation and concerned about forms of cultural erasure and homogenization.” 

Visiting Tsui’s studio several years ago, Ola Wlusek, The Ringling’s Keith D. and Linda L. Monda, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, was captivated by the early stages of Retainers of Anarchy. The project mines history and pop culture and raises contemporary issues of nationhood and migration. The Ringling is “trying to speak to the moment,” she says, and Tsui fits the bill.

Tsui and his team will spend about 10 days in Sarasota setting up the animation and ironing out any technical glitches before the opening. It’s a challenge “to establish this seamless, puzzle-piece kind of piecing together of the five projectors where you don’t know where one projector ends and the other begins,” he says. 

Then it’s on to other projects. Parallax Chambers, another algorithmic animation sequence, opened in January in Vancouver. 

Once he finishes a work, Tsui says he simply services it, making sure it has the maximum impact on viewers. Retainers of Anarchy has upcoming exhibits scheduled in Canada and Australia. Limited gallery space and political pushback pose challenges in Asia, but yes, Tsui says, “I would love for it to make it to Hong Kong.”

Howie Tsui: Retainers of Anarchy runs March 15 through June 14, 2020, at The Ringling Museum of Art Monda Gallery. Tsui will give an artist talk on March 13 at 11:00 AM. For more information, visit ringling.org/events/howie-tsui-retainers-anarchy (exhibition) and ringling.org/events/artist-talk-howie-tsui (talk).