About Howie Tsui

Howie Tsui (徐浩恩, b. 1978, Hong Kong – raised in Lagos and Thunder Bay) is based in Vancouver.

Working in ink brush, sound sculptures, lenticular lightboxes and installations, Tsui constructs tense, fictive environments that undermine venerated art forms and narrative genres, often stemming from the tradition of Chinese martial arts literature. He employs a stylized form of derisive and exaggerated imagery as a way to satirize and disarm broadening regimes and their programs of cultural hegemony. The most notable branch of his practice involves the use of algorithmic animation sequences to raise questions about order, chaos and the potential for social harmony through self-organized societies. Tsui synthesizes diverging socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, trauma, surveillance and otherness through a distinctly outsider lens to cast light onto liminal and diasporic experiences.

Tsui received Canada Council’s Joseph Stauffer Prize in 2005 and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2018. He holds a BFA from the University of Waterloo.