citylikeyou — Thunder Bay / Howie Tsui

Vancouver-based artist Howie Tsui’s culturally divergent practice owes much to the shifting backdrop of his formative years spent in Hong Kong, Lagos and Thunder Bay.

http://www.howietsui.com

Visual Artist

Current city: Ottawa

Other cities: Vancouver Hong Kong Lagos Thunder Bay

howietsui.com

Vancouver-based artist Howie Tsui’s culturally divergent practice owes much to the shifting backdrop of his formative years spent in Hong Kong, Lagos and Thunder Bay.

Ottawa / Market

As a child in Hong Kong, I was always mesmerized by all the glass and mirrors and the way they created this illusion of space. My favourite were aquariums with seahorses in them. Kowloon Market in Chinatown satiates my aquaphilia with their fish tanks, while also satiating my appetite for freshly bonked fish cleaned and ready to be steamed.

Ottawa / Shop

This vintage clothing store ain’t just some new-aged, marked up warehouse for ironic t-shirts and howling wolf hoodies. Brimming to the teats with ghostly relics, Ragtime has come to my rescue on multiple occasions; whether it’s a tailcoat for a bougie gala, Genghis Khan gear for a time-travel party, a Kamikaze pilot for Halloween or knickerbockers for my groomsmen.

Ottawa / Restaurant

We have the best Vietnamese cuisine in Canada thanks to an inclusive policy that opened the city up to thousands of post-war Vietnamese refugees in the late 70s. At the zenith of this flavour heap is Huong’s where I can relive a recent trip to vibrant Hanoi. The whole idea of lining up for egg-y brunch is absurd when you can get a spicy saté noodle lashing here and squash that hangover in seconds.

Ottawa / Bar

With age, I’ve been more reluctant to engage in the cyclical social gymnastics of a high-octane evening. Just give me a pint and a pinball machine and I’ll be a content little monk, cussing at gravity and the wiles of analog engineering. Aside from triggering rebellious teenage memories, the Orange Monkey pool hall is also situated in one of the rare industrial complexes in the city.

Ottawa / Gallery

Artengine is a local arts group that produces technologically based presentations. As part of their Electric Fields program, I recently attended Swim Sound – a sound performance at a municipal pool. A percussionist played on a floating platform, while a knob twiddler tweaked and tweezed the inputs coming from drum mics and a couple underwater mics. Too fun with an encore performance possibly happening in the spring!

Paris / Visual Artist

a person

Los Angeles / Visual Artist

Alison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker working across sound, narrative, sculpture, installation and performance. Her projects, screenings, and performances have been included in Made in LA 2018, Hammer Museum; The Infinite Ear, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Performa, New York; Exchange Value, Los Angeles Nomadic Division; and Louder than Words, the Zuckerman Museum, Atlanta, GA. Solo exhibitions include Skaters’ Score, commissioned by JOAN with support from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts; The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Studio 13-16 project and screening at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Art In General, New York; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France. She is a recipient of grants from Creative Capital, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation; Center for Cultural Innovation; California Community Foundation, and more.

New York / Visual Artist

Joan Wong is a designer that creates visual responses to narratives. She has designed book covers for Penguin, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New Directions, Simon and Schuster, and Harper Collins. She is also a frequent collaborator with the New York Times, creating spot illustrations for their articles. In 2018, she curated and illustrated a collection of online stories about “lives that could have been” called “Sister Life.”

Tuzla / Visual Artist

I am Emir Šehanović, a visual artist from Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Making collages and painting huge murals makes me really happy. I enjoy making art of things I find in my environment - virtual or real. I try to be happy every day.

Binghamton / Visual Artist

Na Chainkua Reindorf (b. 1991, Ghana) is a mixed media artist and mythmaker. Her work, which ranges from large-scale tapestries and paintings to immersive sculptural installations, is an exploration of and an ode to the rich cultural history of West African textiles, focusing largely on the complexities and visual culture surrounding masquerades and ceremonial costumes. She incorporates contemporary materials into her work, using these historical textiles and costumes as inspiration to investigate ongoing social topics centered on the politics of dress, identity and gender and their close relation to culture and tradition. Na Chainkua has exhibited internationally in institutions across the United States, as well as in France, Italy, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Nigeria, and Ghana.

More Visual Artists