Galerie LJ - Booth A 209
Howie Tsui, Dead Sea, 2009, Ink and paint pigment on mulberry paper, 113 x 334 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie LJ.
Galerie LJ presents a duo show by the artists Mu Pan (Taiwan / Brooklyn) and Howie Tsui (Hong Kong / Vancouver) drawing from a common set of fundamental references for their generation and for the Chinese diaspora of which they are a part.
Mu Pan (b. 1976) represents a mixture of Hieronymus Bosch, Utawaga Kuniyoshi and Marvels comics, with his epic and narrative paintings imbued with cultural and historical references to Japan and China, along with a twist of American pop culture. The narratives he creates depict events from old and contemporary Chinese and Japanese history, reinterpreted in his satirical and political visual vocabulary.
The art of Howie Tsui (born 1978) evokes a hybrid of historical influences from Chinese art and Hong Kong pop culture of the 1980s, as well as elements of the North American pop culture in which he grew up. Tsui uses a wide variety of mediums to create fictional installations that disrupt canonised art forms using narrative genres that come from the Chinese literary tradition such as Wuxia fiction.