Howie Tsui, Illustrator
HOWIE TSUI
ILLUSTRATOR
OTTAWA, ONTARIO
www.howietsui.com/How did you get into art?
I always drew as a child for fun and to escape into some fantastical shit. The first drawing I remember doing was of a congested airspace with planes and superhero stickmen shooting at each other with eye beams and guns. It was an exercise in unruly compositions and capturing mad action. After that, I remember rocking some iconographic emo shit when I slipped a picture of a pig face under my sister’s door out of anger. She had locked me out of her room while her and her international school friends frolicked United Colours of Benetton-style. When I moved to Thunder Bay in Grade 1, I was offered an illustrating gig doing the cover of a class produced children’s book called “Mr. Wishy-Washy”. That sealed the deal.
Where did you study art?
At the University of Waterloo. Most people don’t even know such a program exists there but it provided me with a fine, slightly jaded, experience. I wasn’t a super big fan of the work I was exposed to but the formal training and critical thinking was really helpful. At that time, the post-conceptual/post-minimal shit didn’t really speak to me. I was relating to work that was graphic, irreverent and unpretentious with clever narratives. Juxtapoz saved me large.
Did you know art was the way you wanted to go from the get-go?
Well, it is pretty customary in Chinese culture to aim for a “professional” career, you know, be a lawyer or a doctor and make a wad of cash so you can take care of your folks, eat geoduck every night and hand out handsome sums of lucky money. But I knew art was the realist shit (aside from basketball) so I tricked my folks and told them that I was pursuing a career in architecture. I would later drop out of OAC physics. When I started university, I used my arts administration co-op program to deflect any flack.
You have been all over the world, from your birthplace (Hong Kong) to Kenya to your current home, Ottawa. Where is your favorite place in the world and why?
Most of my globetrotting days were before I turned 7. So I only have old photos of myself doing kung fu poses in front of shoalin temples to jog my memory. I did, however, just get back from a two-week trip from San Francisco and I’m developing serious withdrawal symptoms. The weather rules, it’s geographical qualities, all the different neighborhoods, the amazing seafood and all the super-friendly people with their purebred dogs, tattoos and cell phones.
Rock and roll, particularly Kiss, is a common theme in your work. Who are some of your favorite groups? What (if anything) do you listen to while you work? What are your top five most-listened to tracks?
My taste in music is disappointingly not too varied, mostly hip-hop and indie rock. Some favourite groups off the top of my head would include old indie canons like Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Heavy Vegetable, Neutral Milk and Slint. As for hip-hop it’d be Wu Tang, Tribe, Hieroglyphics and Biggie. As for new stuff, I quite enjoy Edan, Go Team, Sufjan Stevens and MF Doom. Lately, I’ve been listening to Motown, the delta blues and trying to relive my high school years with some early 90’s hip-hop. Top 5 tracks? That is hard? Can I avoid this question by plugging the band I play in called The Acorn (kelprecords.com)?
Many of your paintings involve innocents (children and animals) in less-than-innocent situations (such as No Carbs, where one sweet-looking creature knocks out another equally sweet-looking creature). Does this reflect your own view of children and their place in society?
I’m kinda fascinated by how children instinctively think of creative ways to harm things. I remember one summer in Thunder Bay when our trees were infested with armyworms that would clump together into these disgusting, pulsating blobs. To eliminate these ‘pests’, my friends and I filled an entire bottle of rubbing alcohol with army worms, poured them onto the street, set it ablaze and watched them writhe while drool came out of our mouths. In retrospect, that visceral experience has become really striking when I associate it with geopolitics and the baser aspects of human nature.
Some of your earlier paintings use and lampoon traditional Asian art. Do you think this reveals any of your feelings about your background or working as an Asian artist?
Well, I didn’t really do those pieces with any grand statement in mind. But for some reason, I found that tweaking a cheesy, mass-produced reproduction of Asian Art would be fun. Most Asian commercial goods that you find here are so cliché and mass-produced that I wanted to imbue them with some special sauce by painting on them. Also, I like the temporal dimension that develops in these works when you juxtapose old school Asian art with contemporary aesthetics and elements. I see it like a compressed history of character design when you draw over a manga character by Hokusai with one by Osamu Tesuka, and then one by Akira Toriyama and finally topping it off with one of me mongrels.
Your work displays a dreamy, erratic style that is not uncommon in popular art. Do you think you are influenced, whether positively or unhelpfully, by the explosion of art by 20-something artists in pop culture?
I definitely get excited by the work of certain contemporaries. With the internet, you can ingest so much visual information and sometimes it can be inspiring or you can get lured into adopting elements into your work that is like the new haircut style. I find it pretty hard to navigate this youth culture-based art “explosion” because there is so many images and so much biting without personal touches that I don’t even know who’s work is who’s.
I’d much rather work in a collective environment like when I was in school. I find the best inspiration comes from working closely with friends and developing your work together. Right now, I’m in bubble world.
Describe a truly successful day. Is it spent painting? At a show opening?
I avoid the computer completely and avoid all work that is not super fun and free, such as: commissions, commercial work, image editing and doing interviews. Instead, I feel inspired and start drawing weird workable ideas that remind me of special experiences I had during my childhood. I get excited over said ideas and commit them onto canvas. Other ideas spring forward and the deliberation process of adding and editing is not terribly painful. I try really hard to work loosely and try not to scrap the piece when I realize some element reminds me of someone else’s work. Eat some pho for late lunch followed by a productive little critique by a friend. I get a sense of the direction of the piece and feel excited to tackle it later. Snuggle with the missus and the cat for a bit and listen to some music. Have a nice dinner with said missus and get ready to play a show with the band. Sound check is smooth. The bill that we’re on is exciting. The shit is sold out and the crowd is mad active. A good pre-show boozy-buzz has been well cultivated. Bowels have been long emptied. The Acorn play a really tight and super fun set with awesome sound. More drinking with friends. Eat a bowl of late night pho then go bombing. Then go home and pork with the missus. Go to bed with a super voltron high that combines the collective buzzes of arting, eating, rocking, bombing and porking.
What advice would you give to people who want to become artists like yourself?
Option #1: Animal costumes, drips, birds and deer, line drawing, flashy colours, bubbles, obscure text, rainbows. Option #2: Representational art is dead. It’s abstract or broke.
Posted: January 2nd, 2008 under Howie Tsui.
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