When Howie Tsui and his family settled in Canada’s Thunder Bay, a sparsely populated, blue-collar corner of northern Ontario, his connection to Hong Kong was getting stretched. It was 1984, after a few years in Lagos. But like many members of the Hong Kong diaspora who were born in the 1970s and 80s, one medium dropped him back into the city’s orbit: its pop culture and entertainment.
It arrived on videocassettes, mailed from Hong Kong and flown across the Pacific Ocean before it landed in the city, situated by Lake Superior. For young Tsui, that connection had a particularly personal layer: to satisfy the requirements for being new immigrants, his father had started a videocassette manufacturing business in Canada. The tapes that his uncle used to record programmes in Hong Kong could have been products made by the family business.
On these tapes were slapstick comedies, wuxia action flicks and other output from a golden age of Hong Kong cinema, starring the likes of Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Stephen Chow and Michael Hui. There were also episodes of dubbed Japanese animated series that were popular among kids in the city, like Doraemon and Dr Slump. Some of the tapes were bought; others were bootlegged.
In Thunder Bay, those tapes meant a lot to Tsui. He watched them in the basement of the house he lived in, over and over again, iconic scenes getting burned into his memory. Decades later, the visual grammar of that era’s films became an important source of inspiration in his artistic practice, but only after the artist found a sense of reassurance that allowed him to create work that stood out distinctly from the contemporary art canon that surrounded him.
Tsui studied art at the University of Waterloo in Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and felt like the work that he wanted to create didn’t quite chime with the art that was being made by the people around him. It wasn’t clear to the artist-in-training that the style he was after—inspired by cartoons, anime and fantastical imagery—could find an audience. But that changed when Tsui discovered publications like Giant Robot, a zine that showcased popular culture, cinema, design and art with an Asian-American bent, as well as Juxtapoz, a magazine that focused on street art, illustration, and pop and urban art. Tsui also found resonance in superflat, the art movement defined by Takashi Murakami that picked up steam in the early 2000s.
Indeed, Tsui’s early work had a distinct Japanese flair to it. In the series Of Manga and Mongrels (2006–08), he lifted elements from drawings by the Edo-period ukiyo-e artist Hokusai, then inked his own caricatures of anime characters over the forms. Many are a mess of limbs and bodies, perhaps with tusks or bat ears or extra sets of eyes. In his next body of work, Of Shunga & Monsters (2007–08), Tsui doubled down on using Japanese imagery as a base for his own characters, then upped the visual complexity. He used entangled bodies from erotic illustrations, merging and reworking them to make a new set of characters’ grotesque faces. On top of intertwined, mid-coitus bodies that were first printed in the 18th and 19th centuries, Tsui moulded facial shapes, adding hair or moustaches, scales or eyes, twisted horns or amphibian features, deforming and transmuting the figures in deliberate body horror that was far more freakish and organic than his Mongrels.
As Tsui’s practice progressed, he still mined a sinister mind space – but in a manner that was playful and characteristic of the Hong Kong entertainment that he enjoyed so much. His art gradually drew more from the culture of the city where he was born, flashes of it punctuating his images.
The artworks in his Horror Fables series – first presented in 2009 at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, then in 2010 at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) – incorporated scenes from Chinese and Japanese folklore and legends, some of which he encountered through the taped TV shows and films that he watched in his family’s Thunder Bay basement.
Tsui found the drive to ramp up the intensity in this set of work, using ink and paint to put a chaotic mishmash of supernatural scenes on mulberry paper. Here, the cinematic hat-tips are more explicit. In Forest Romp (2009), for instance, we see a man bound to a tree, arrows protruding from his torso. It’s a scene from The Yang’s Saga, a 1985 six-episode fantasy action series that aired on Hong Kong television channel TVB Jade. The show was a stylised retelling of the story of one family’s defence against invaders across three generations during the Song dynasty. Tsui paints the figure with his face peeled off and hanging from his chin – a gruesome fate suffered by the reincarnated thunder deity, who was dispatched to the mortal realm to assist the Yang clan (and was played by Tony Leung in the TVB adaptation).
Courtesy the artist.
Several hefty threads converged in Horror Fables. It was the first time Tsui had featured landscape in his work, and he drew inspiration from Ming dynasty scroll painters’ brushwork for this new layer. He depicts grisly scenes – the peeled face; a man severed in half and dragged on the ground nearby, leaving a trail of blood behind him; impalement; tongue-ripping; bodies cooked in a cauldron; sea monsters; ghosts; and a man whose eyes have been plucked out, his head and hands the only parts of his body protruding from a crate. These depictions highlight the terror woven into lore that’s handed down from one generation to the next, first as oral tradition, then recorded in text, and perhaps eventually in still or moving images. At the same time, they lampoon the fear that is pervasive in media, advertising and political messaging. Think of the bloody moments in Forest Romp lifted from The Yang’s Saga – they were aired on TV during prime time, as entertainment, with some of Hong Kong’s hottest actors starring.
Ahead of the opening of The Cradle Rocks Above an Abyss, an exhibition of Tsui’s work at Hanart and the artist’s long-overdue first solo show in Hong Kong, he recalled one vivid sensation that he experienced whenever he visited the city in his youth. The way the water hit his body when he showered in his uncle’s apartment in Hong Kong, Tsui said, felt different from his experience in Thunder Bay. Maybe it was variations in the water’s mineral content, or perhaps it was a visceral marker for home or something like it. Like many diasporic families, Tsui’s regularly returned to their roots. Hong Kong and its patchwork culture was not an abstract concept gleaned on a screen; it was something that Tsui had a chance to live and breathe. Every homecoming, if that’s the right word, was a gentle reintroduction to the city. As the artist said during a brief conversation at Hanart, he had to have spent time away from Hong Kong to develop his way of making art.
Retainers of Anarchy (2016) is a five-channel algorithmic animation work, first seeded as a concept in 2010, after Tsui saw a digitally animated version of a well-known Song dynasty scroll, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, produced for the Chinese Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. After the artist got over the initial sense of awe and wonder the installation was meant to evoke, he realised that its depiction of a harmonious, idealistic society mirrored a narrative that the state worked hard to propagate. Again, applying his own brand of wry humour, Tsui jacked the style of the original scroll painting, adding his own twist to depict a range of characters in the Kowloon Walled City, a lawless, cramped place that had its own way of life.
The artist folds scenes from wuxia novels, Cantonese films and real-life Hong Kong into the same universe. In one unit, a man makes bouncing bamboo noodles, riding a bamboo stick to press dough. In another, a rice cooker signals that it’s finished while men shuffle mahjong tiles, their game undisturbed. Outside the city’s walls, vampires controlled by a Taoist priest hop by a beggars’ gang, a martial arts clan that often appears in the novels of wuxia writers like Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha). The fact that wuxia fiction was banned in mainland China until 1980 adds to the irreverence of the work.
Ambitious single-channel animation sequence Parallax Chambers (2018-) was shown at Tai Kwun as part of the INK CITY exhibition in 2021, as well as at Hanart this year. The scenes are loaded with references to wuxia novels and films, but also visuals that Cantonese speakers and those who know Hong Kong might chuckle at – a wireless telephone cooking in a pot of congee refers to a local expression that means to chat incessantly on the phone, and a giant grouper in a glass tank looks like it could be found at one of the city’s seafood restaurants. An algorithm determines the combinations of animated segments that appear on screen, the lighting that goes with them, the sounds that play, and when and how fast laser beams ricochet across the screen (a motif from old wuxia films), as well as shifts between rooms and spaces. The generative work is immensely fun to watch, each section painstakingly drawn by the artist, while his collaborators assisted him with programming, sound design and animation.
That’s all to say that Tsui’s practice, like his algorithmic video works, is still evolving. In recent ink and paint drawings on mulberry paper, he warps scenes from the 1984 TVB adaptation of The Duke of Mount Deer, a series of novels penned by Jin Yong with a comedic take on the wuxia genre. Tsui manages to draw a line between nostalgia and novelty, giving people a fresh way to think about their roots in Hong Kong, no matter which shores they grew up on.
Featured image: Pyromancers (detail) by Howie Tsui, Paint pigment and ink on mulberry paper mounted on silk, 74.3 x 106 cm, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery.
當徐浩恩與家人移居到加拿大安大略省北部人煙稀少的藍領角落雷灣，他與香港的關係變得更加遙遠。時為1984年，之前他與家人在尼日利亞的拉各斯生活了數年。然而，他與許多生於1970至80年代香港的異鄉人一樣，憑藉香港的流行文化和娛樂媒體，再次與城市的軌跡連上。
這種媒體化身從香港空郵寄出的錄影帶，穿越太平洋後來到蘇必略湖旁的城市。徐氏年輕時，與錄影帶有著切身連繫：為了滿足新移民的需求，徐爸爸在加拿大開展了製造錄影帶的生意。這些由徐家在港親友把香港節目錄下的錄影帶，可能是徐家家庭生意的產品。
錄影帶的內容除了諧笑喜劇和功夫片，還有其他來自香港電影黃金時代的作品，參演的包括劉德華、梁朝偉、周星馳和許冠文等。當中還有一些深受城中小孩歡迎的配音日本卡通片集，例如是《叮噹》（後來稱「多啦A夢」）和《IQ博士》。部份錄影帶是購來的，另一些則是家中錄製。
對於身在雷灣的徐氏而言，這些錄影帶意義重大，他會在家中地下室反覆觀看，一些經典場面也因而烙在記憶中。數十年後，那個電影年代的視覺語言成為了徐氏藝術實踐的靈感泉源，但這位藝術家到了自我肯定後，才創作出與身邊當代藝術教條截然不同的作品。
徐氏於1990年代末至2000年代初在加拿大滑鐵盧大學修讀藝術，當時覺得自己想創作的作品，總與同代人的創作格格不入。這位準藝術家那時尚在求學階段，所以並不了解他想做出的動漫奇幻風格其實也有觀眾欣賞。令他改觀的刊物，首先是《Giant Robot》雜誌，裡面收錄了亞裔美國人眼中的流行文化、電影、設計和藝術，而《Juxtapoz》雜誌則以街頭藝術、插圖、普普藝術和都會藝術為焦點。至2000年初，藝壇興起了一片由村上隆所定義的「超平面」藝術運動，徐氏也在當中找到共鳴。
事實上，徐氏的早期作品便散發著獨特的東洋風。在《Of Manga and Mongrels》 （2006–08年）系列中，他從江戶時代葛飾北齋的浮世繪畫作中提煉出元素，創作出自己的動畫人物形態，很多人物的四肢與身體亂作一團，有些長有獠牙、蝙蝠耳朵，甚至是多一雙眼睛。徐氏在後續的《Of Shunga & Monsters》（2007-08年）中，更強烈地以日式意境作為筆下角色的基調，再提升視覺複雜性。他把風月插圖中交纏的身體合併重組，拼湊出全新的怪誕面相。他所參考的作品最先刊於18、 19 世紀，當中畫有魚水之歡中交疊的身體。除了這些體形，徐氏也改造了畫作中的臉形，加上頭髮、鬍鬚、鱗片、眼睛、扭角甚或是兩棲動物的特徵，刻意地把人物體形扭曲變異，營造出的恐怖感和有機形成效果均遠遠超越前作。
徐氏在創作藝術時，不忘挖空一片略帶陰森但調皮逗玩的心靈空間，留給自己非常喜歡的香港娛樂特色。徐氏生於香港，這個城市的文化點滴成為他的靈感，不時在他作品中閃出光芒。
《Horror Fables》系列首次於2009年在渥太華卡爾頓大學展出， 2010年在蒙特利爾跨文化藝術中心亮相。該系列融合了來自中國和日本民間傳說的場景，包括徐氏小時候，在雷灣家中地下室看錄影電視節目和電影時所遇到的片段。
為了令作品加倍震撼，徐氏利用水墨和油彩把超自然的混亂場面畫在桑皮紙上。向電影致敬的㾗跡在這些作品中更見明顯。以《Forest Romp》（2009年）為例，畫中萬箭穿心的男人被綁在樹上，這一幕正是來自《楊家將》電視劇。這部六集奇幻動作劇集，於1985年在香港無線電視翡翠台播放，以別樹一幟的故事風格，道出宋代一家三代對抗外敵的故事。徐氏所描繪的悲劇人物死狀悲壯，臉皮被撕開並懸在頦下；在故事中，他是天庭派往協助楊家將的托世雷震子，無線電視版本的角色由梁朝偉飾演。
《Horror Fables》集合了幾道沉重的脈絡。徐氏首次在作品中以山水為焦點，新層次的靈感源自明代畫卷的筆工。他刻劃的場面令人毛骨悚然：臉皮撕開；人體被分割成兩半並被拖往附近地上，留下血跡；刺穿身體；扯舌根；在大鍋中烹屍；海怪；鬼怪；眼被掏空的人，只看到頭和手伸出木箱之外。徐氏的作品凸顯了民間傳說中令人生畏的情節，世世代代先是口耳相傳，再有文字紀錄，後來還有可能變成照片或流動影像。與此同時，徐氏也透過作品諷刺媒體、廣告和政治訊息中泛濫的恐懼。試想像《Forest Romp》中的血腥場面，它取材自《楊家將》，是黃金時間播出、供人娛樂的電視劇，還由香港當年炙手可熱的演員擔演。
漢雅軒為徐氏在香港舉行首個人展覽《搖籃在深淵上搖晃》，在這個早該舉辦的展覽開幕之前，徐氏回想起少年時代回港探親的深刻記憶：他在親友家中沖花灑浴，水打在身上的感覺與雷灣的很不一樣。也許是礦物成份不同，又或者是由心而發，真的回家了的感覺。和許多僑民家庭一樣，徐氏久不久就會回到出生的地方尋根。所以徐氏不只透過屏幕接觸香港和它的拼湊文化，而是親身經歷過、呼吸過它的氣息。如果「回鄉」一詞沒有用錯，他每次回鄉都慢慢地重新認識香港。徐氏於漢雅軒的簡短對話中，談及自己需要在香港以外生活，才可以發展出創作藝術的方法。
《混沌護衛》（2016年）是一組五個頻道的演算法動畫作品，最初的概念來自2010年，當時徐氏參觀了為上海世界博覽會中國館特別製作，宋代《清明河上圖》的數碼動畫版。在徐氏感受過此作品刻意引發的驚艷之後，他發現描繪和諧的理想世界映照了一個國家努力營造的敘述。再一次，運用其獨特的反諷幽默，並借用了畫卷原作的風格，以自家手法畫出了九龍城寨，這個擁擠小社群龍蛇混雜，獨有其一套生存之道。
徐氏把武俠小說、粵語片和香港真實生活的片段加進了同一個宇宙。在一個單位中，有人騎著竹杆、壓著麵糰來製作竹昇麵。在另一個空間，電飯煲亮著米飯已煮熟的顯示燈，燈號未有擾亂旁邊麻雀枱的四方城大戰。在城寨圍牆外，道士指揮的殭屍列隊跳動，經過金庸筆下武術小說中所描繪的丐幫人馬。武術小說於1980年前在中國內地禁止出版，這一點為這幅作品增添了反諷感。
《視差秘室》（2018年至今）是充滿野心的單頻道動畫片段，曾於2021年在大館的「墨城」展覽中展出，今年再度在漢雅軒亮相。片中影像充斥著武俠小說和電影的參照，也有一些讓懂粵語及認識香港文化觀眾會心微笑的畫面：粥裡放著手提電話正是「電話粥」的比喻（即不停地在電話談天）；還有香港中式酒樓常見的魚缸裡面的一尾巨型石斑。屏幕上的生成動畫片段由演算法來決定影像、配對燈光、背景音樂的組合，還有激光光束閃過畫面的速度（武俠電影中經常出現的刀劍效果），以及房間與其他空間的交替頻率。作品上每一個部份的影象均由徐氏悉心描繪，而編程、音效設計和動畫則由他的合作者操刀。
徐浩恩的藝術實踐就如他的演算法視像作品般一直演進。在近期的桑皮紙水墨及油彩畫作中，他加入的片段來自無線電視1984年改編的金庸諧趣武俠小說《鹿鼎記》。徐氏在懷舊與創新之間精準拿捏，對觀賞的香港人來說，無論他們在何處成長，欣賞徐氏作品後都會對香港的根有著新的想法。
