
Howie Tsui,
Veranda Pounce, 2024
A Click Track for Pugilists is Howie Tsui’s new exhibition at the Patel Brown Gallery, a retrospective spanning 12 years of his artistic practice. From the sets of the Shaw Brothers studios to self-mutilating anti-heroes, Tsui’s works take an irreverent and sometimes humorous look at a Hong Kong of the past as perceived through the imagination.
Tsui was born in Hong Kong and raised in Lagos and Thunder Bay. Growing up in Thunder Bay, there wasn’t much of a contemporary art scene, so Tsui initially claimed he would go into architecture. He ultimately obtained a BFA from the University of Waterloo but still had a practical approach to tackling his art career. He did co-op placements in cultural institutions, splitting his time between a studio practice and job placements.
“So I knew if I failed as an artist, I would at least have experience to work in the arts,” he says.
Eventually, he landed a part-time job at the Ottawa Art Gallery while exhibiting at underground spaces and street art communities. He was heavily involved in youth culture, cutting his teeth at DJ parties, graffiti parties and dance culture, allowing him to develop his practice without too much of a rigid or established structure.
“And there’s a nice thing about maybe that period in art making, I think about, or at least, you know, I’m biased towards it … Like I think now what I see is that all the artists are very professional and that’s maybe a good thing, but maybe it’s a detriment in a way because it creates a bit of uniformity or a homogenous approach to art practice or art making or how artists speak about art,” he says.
But at some point, he became an adult and started applying for grants. He had his first artist-run centre show at Gallery 101 in Ottawa and eventually had exhibitions in other public spaces around the city.
“So it was a slow path to being more like, I guess, official and predictable,” he says.
Tsui’s approach to his works tends to be narrative-based. He describes his work as “… kind of still frames from what seems to be from an imaginary movie or animation or film. And there’s this kind of collusion between the grotesque and humorous, satirical, absurdist, surreal, that’s always kind of been there.”
Furthermore, he adds, “And I’ve never been interested in work that is text based, because oftentimes text-based work often is in English. So then you’re also creating a supremacy as to what the language is, and who can understand it, understand the work. So that’s why my work tends to solely function on the image, because I find that universal.”
This narrative approach stems from Tsui’s childhood, watching Hong Kong films. His father owned a video cassette manufacturing plant in Thunder Bay, which was why they could immigrate. From there, they would send blank cassettes to Hong Kong, and Tsui’s uncles would record Hong Kong films on them and then send them back to Canada. Tsui remembers going downstairs with his sister to watch the video cassettes with their parents. The video cassettes had a kind of power, like getting a rare food ingredient from one’s home country and replicating the taste of home.
It was also a unique moment in Hong Kong’s history when Hong Kong films were made for Hong Kong audiences. “There was that era, there’s like this wild … delirious filmmaking, written, you know, the pace of filmmaking, the way that it was for local audiences. Like it didn’t have to be for mainland audiences, it didn’t have to be for the West or anything. It was films that were made and captured Hong Kong without kind of this feeling of having to serve someone else,” he says.
Tsui’s six new works intentionally reference the Shaw Brothers studio, Hong Kong’s largest film production company, from 1925 to 2011. The studio complex has largely been abandoned and fallen into disrepair. Tsui depicts absurdist and chaotic combat scenes with the backdrop of the Shaw Brothers’ old film sets. “So I was interested in kind of depicting that space because, you know, those sets kind of created this fictionalized Asia for me to see through these films,” he says.
A further ode to Tsui’s love for cinema can be seen through GIF Roulette, a curation of film and television scenes spread across three screens. He describes it as a fun piece, reflecting a disappearing part of Hong Kong culture. Regarding this piece’s references to Hong Kong pop culture, he harkens back to his mother, who owned a Chinese Canadian restaurant, when creating a palatable menu accessible to a broad audience.
Tsui’s earliest works in the exhibition were produced in 2012, still pulling from the same narrative thread of absurdist, surreal combat scenes. It’s a five-panel deer hide work called Malingers, Skulkers, and Dupes. The Agnes Etherington Art Centre originally commissioned it as a bicentennial commemoration of the War of 1812.
Through his research, Tsui found a surgeon’s guidebook called On Feigned and Factitious Diseases, a field guide for surgeons of that era to detect soldiers who were faking their illnesses. In a bid to destabilize the dominant narrative of valiant heroism, Tsui depicts grotesque accounts of soldiers slicing off their own Achilles heel or shooting themselves in the foot to escape going to war.
“I was kind of conflating both formally these traditional war illustrations that appeared in print production, as well as the medium of the deer hide is a reference to how old-school historical war strategy maps tend to be,” he says.
A Click Track for Pugilists is Tsui’s inquiry into the exhaustion and cycle around conflict, especially in the lead-up to the U.S. elections. The ‘click track’ refers to a metronome’s monotonous, robotic sound. It alludes to the monotonous feeling of grievance around conflict, whether we must live as aggrieved people all the time or if we could move past it.
Tsui is currently based in Vancouver. A Click Track for Pugilists is showing at Patel Brown in Toronto from January 11 to February 22, 2025.
Phoebe An Lee has written and edited for various media outlets, such as newspapers, marketing collateral, project proposals, and other corporate communications materials. Her real love, however, is writing martial arts fantasy, where she can let her imagination roam free. As a third culture kid growing up Filipino-Chinese-Canadian and living in various countries in her young adult life, she is inspired by her cultural upbringing and committed to advancing diversity in literature. She is also an executive of the Canadian Authors Association in Toronto, holding the position of Treasurer and Programmer.