{"id":21133,"date":"2021-06-10T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2021-06-10T16:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=21133"},"modified":"2021-09-09T10:27:25","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T17:27:25","slug":"vancouver-artist-howie-tsui-brings-retainers-of-anarchy-to-victoria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2021\/06\/10\/vancouver-artist-howie-tsui-brings-retainers-of-anarchy-to-victoria\/","title":{"rendered":"Vancouver artist Howie Tsui brings Retainers of Anarchy<\/em> to Victoria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cultural art is extremely important to society because of the way it can convey its artist\u2019s thoughts and feelings about their countries and cultures. Look no further than Fan Kuan\u2019s famous Travelers Among Mountains and Streams<\/em> painting, which vividly conveys the magic world of China in the Song dynasty, or the masterworks of Akira Kurosawa, whose engaging film depictions of the Japanese Sengoku period in such movies as Seven Samurai<\/em> has earned him the title of one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.<\/p>\n

And now, with expert use of the narrative style of\u00a0wuxia<\/em>,\u00a0a genre of fantasy literature that concerns the adventures of martial artists upholding chivalrous ideals against oppressive powers during unstable times, Chinese artist Howie Tsui has created Retainers of Anarchy<\/em>, a vivid solo art exhibit on now at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Howie Tsui’s Retainers of Anarchy<\/em> is being shown at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from June 12 to October 24 (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a visual artist and I\u2019m based in Vancouver,\u201d begins Tsui, who describes his work as a mix of \u201chigh art and low art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Retainers of Anarchy<\/em> consists of two works; the title piece is a 25-metre scroll-esque video installation.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne work is a large-scale media work, also called \u2018Retainers of Anarchy,\u2019 and another work is a sound sculpture work called \u2018Hei Gung Deviation,\u2019 it\u2019s a sculptural work, it looks like a wooden martial-arts dummy,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Tsui says that inspiration for his artwork comes from everything from scary stories to animation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m influenced by superstition, ghost stories, fear, these ideas of order versus chaos, and loops\u2014I\u2019m interested in loops and sampling,\u201d he says. \u201cI like this animation from the \u201980s called Dr. Slump<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tsui says that these influences blended together to make Retainers of Anarchy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been working since the early 2000s, so it\u2019s almost like 20 years of work,\u201d he says. \u201cI think it\u2019s been slowly maturing. It just kind of happens organically and in a piecemeal kind of way\u2014not everything is jammed together all at once. Everything slowly builds up and interlocks with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like everyone else, Tsui has been dealing with working throughout a pandemic-ravaged year and a half. And, like a lot of artists, he used his work to help him get through it all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say I\u2019ve been fortunate, because there\u2019s still a lot of projects that I\u2019ve been working on that haven\u2019t been cancelled,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019ve been affected, but they\u2019re still kind of moving forward. So I\u2019ve been busy working through those, and it gives me a feeling of normalcy, kind of just plugging away. The difficulty is that there\u2019s no social interaction, which is usually a good place to spark creativity or have an idea that can move further through engaging socially with my friends and colleagues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Retainers of Anarchy
\n<\/em>Saturday, June 12 to Sunday, October 24
\nArt Gallery of Greater Victoria
\naggv.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cultural art is extremely important to society because of the way it can convey its artist\u2019s thoughts and feelings about their countries and cultures. Look no further than Fan Kuan\u2019s famous Travelers Among Mountains and Streams painting, which vividly conveys the magic world of China in the Song dynasty, or the masterworks of Akira Kurosawa, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-webexclusive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21133"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21474,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21133\/revisions\/21474"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}