Kathryn Tsui's Cloud Ribbon: Locating an Earthly Logic
In her landmark 1965 book, On Weaving, German textile art pioneer Anni Albers, wrote that “we touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form.” As an educator at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, a ‘tactile sensibility’ was at the heart of her practice. Albers saw possibility in crafting textiles for artistic expression beyond just manufacturing ‘good design’, maintaining that “our tactile experiences are elemental.” Several decades later in Aotearoa, New Zealand, new connections are formed in the work of artist Kathryn Tsui. Her hand-woven world features a teahouse, a willow tree, above which floats a batwing cloud, while across the way a kiln is stoked, close to two sleek mid-century modernist facades. Tsui’s textiles tell a story.
Kathryn Tsui, Artist Portrait. Image Credit: Objectspace
Of Cantonese Chinese New Zealand descent, Tsui is part of a community which comprises of families, like mine, who trace their lineage across several generations in Aotearoa since leaving southern China, and include those who followed the gold rushes in the mid-19th Century. Similar to other diasporic Cantonese around the Asia-Pacific rim, our historic legacy in The Antipodes has been largely assimilationist and imperfect, with often out-dated understandings of Chinese heritage, imported and re-told to us (and to each other) — as tales of ‘Old Cathay’ and the ‘Silk Road’ — through British colonial narratives and orientalist understandings. Take for instance the ‘Blue Willow’ porcelain pattern – a design originating from Staffordshire and misattributed as Chinese.
Cloud Ribbon exhibition at Objectspace, Kathryn Tsui, 2024. Photo: Sam Hartnett
Longevity Sampler (Detail, 2024), Kathryn Tsui. Photo: Sam Hartnett
Success Sampler (Detail, 2023), Kathryn Tsui. Photo: Sam Hartnett
Two long wall-hangings within Tsui’s 2024 exhibition Cloud Ribbon at Objectspace extend a threshold through which to reinterpret heritage forms, fresh from the perspective of a faithful learner and cultural insider. Colourful and intricately woven, both Success Sampler (2023) and Longevity Sampler (2024), draw inspiration from Chinese imperial dragon cloth and numerology. Between this auspicious pairing, smaller compositions — interwoven with thousands of tiny cobalt blue glass beads of various shades —speak the language of the Blue Willow, reworked as pictorial vignettes that reference the lives of Chinese New Zealand artists who are part of our constellation in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Willow with Batwing Cloud, Kathryn Tsui, 2024. Photo: Sam Hartnett. Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand
The combination of ancient cosmology with Aotearoa Cantonese art history is a considered approach from an artist with a prolific output. Kathryn is an expert weaver. It took her a while to feel comfortable to shift from identifying as a ‘textile-based practitioner’ to being called a ‘textile artist’. Although a small detail, this self-awareness is behind her intention to centre the Māori concept of whakapapa (genealogical layers) in her art practice. For this process, she works with familiar Chinese art and design tropes to focus conversations around art-making, craft and labour traditions.
Bluewhitered in plaid, Kathryn Tsui, 2023. Photo: Danika Fanshawe
Since 2018, Tsui has been interrogating the visual shorthand of the red, white and blue market bags, exhibiting her work widely in New Zealand and Australia. Also known as the ‘Amahbag’, ‘Hong Kong Burberry’, ‘Chinatown Tote’ or ‘Samoan Suitcase’, this common object comes preloaded with its own baggage: negative connotations of racial stereotypes, precarious migration, cheap plastic and mass production. Yet through a culturally-centred repurposing of the bag – the woven pattern becomes a graphic morse code tapped out in red white and blue, to become a wink and a nod for many Chinese, Asian and other diasporic third culture kids. As Pacific textile scholar, Sonya Withers puts it: “The market bag is a visual language of connection for all of us.”
Global traditions of weaving reveal practical and philosophical understandings of hand-crafting, women’s work, and in our current global economy, Asian labour. Amah bags rapidly manufactured by anonymous hands over industrialised monster looms, often ‘Made in China’. Yet these mechanics echo across oceans. There’s a learning through doing, and transferal of knowledge through repetition. The tiniest stitches and loose fibres are drawn together to form an indomitable whole.
Tsui’s exploration of heritage forms specifically takes place in Aotearoa under the following cultural labour conditions. There is a growing need for contemporary Chinese and Asian artists and makers to respect and connect with indigenous Māori, and our historic settlement in Aotearoa made possible by Te Tiriti O Waitangi. The challenge to decolonise practice as Tauiwi (non-Māori) New Zealanders and positioning as Tangata Tiriti (People of Te Tiriti) requires self-education on colonisation and working towards building meaningful relationships with Mana Whenua (local Māori). A question that has emerged within Asian Aotearoa Arts spaces is: “How do we honour both our ancestors and Te Tiriti?” This includes reckoning with intergenerational trauma, racism and assimilation.
Flatpack Bag Form, Kathryn Tsui, 2023. Photo: Danika Fanshawe
Another everyday item used as a basket or a bag found here in Aotearoa, is the hand-woven kete. It is also symbolic valued as a vessel for wisdom and knowledge passed on by tipuna (ancestors). Using muka (fibre) ceremonially harvested from harekeke (New Zealand flax), Māori weaving or rāranga has traditionally been practiced by women, through practical items such as (kupenga) fishing nets and whāriki (mats) to prestigious korowai (cloaks) and tukutuku (interior latticework). In Te Ao Māori, the practice of weaving — pattern-making, balance, growth, order and strength — also promotes a re-valuing of labour as hononga (union) and taupuhipuhi (collective and mutal support).
With a vision to build community while working at Corban’s Estate in 2013, Tsui collaborated with Kim Lowe and Simon Kaan to organise the inaugural hui (meeting) of Chinese New Zealand artists, to “create a platform to be in a room together to start a conversation and see what would happen.” The gathering enabled Tsui, Lowe, Kaan, myself and others to meet senior artists like Brent Wong, Harry Wong, Wailin Elliott and Dion Hitchens, and would inspire a decade of sustained conversations and collective activity in Asian Aotearoa Arts.
Lanyard, 2023, Kathryn Tsui. Photo: Danika Fanshawe
I thought we first met at that hui in 2013, however Tsui reminded me it was actually earlier on the dance-floor of our friend’s Steve and Jayne’s wedding. A weaving of movement and patterns keeps reoccurring. Some of Tsui’s early influences growing up in Hong Kong and then Hamilton included cartoons and dance classes. She fondly recalled her grandfather’s calligraphy and her mother Doris, who is also a maker and avid cross-stitcher. Tsui attended Cashmere High School in Otautahi Christchurch in the 1990s where she had a standard western art history curriculum that featured Cezanne, Picasso, Gauguin and Canterbury regional painting. Like many New Zealand artists with global appetites, Tsui would soon after move to London in time to experience rave culture and a newly opened Tate Modern and its creative ambitions for the new millennium. After Tsui returned she went to Art School and gained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau (2007)
Ngan House c1970, Kathryn Tsui, 2024. Photo: Sam Hartnett. Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand
Tsui’s minimal colour palette — red, white and blue in the case of the market bags, and cobalt blue in her Blue Willow re-workings, follows Albers’s assertion that limitations can spark creativity and provide maximum opportunities for exploration. Simple yet skilled handcrafting reveal novel readings: Tsui was amused to hear that her tiny iridescent blue beads reminded me of 8-bit pixel graphics from 1980s video games. Technology loops back to reference itself in that the godfather of modern computing Charles Babbage was inspired by the punch cards used in Jacquard weaving looms (that originated in France and spread through the industrial revolution) to programme his ‘Analytical Engine’.
Tsui re-examines art and craft histories and mechanics — what we collectively learn, value and tell ourselves — through Chinese art and artists in Aotearoa New Zealand. Ornate Chinese artefacts from textile and ceramic collections at Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand and Auckland Museum provided rich inspiration for cloud ribbon. Te Papa’s Qing Dynasty ch’i fu, or dragon robe, is a court gown that according to the museum citing Asian textile scholar John Vollmer, appears as a map of the celestial world with water at the hem as multicoloured striped waves with clouds and dragons floating above in the sky around the torso. The wearer places their head through the centre of this universe.
Red Blue White Squares, Kathryn Tsui, 2023. Photo: Danika Fanshawe
Beyond the symbolic power and imperial grandeur of the pieces, Tsui was able to get behind the scenes at the museum to locate an earthly logic, learning about technical aspects such as the thread count, stitching and mark-ups required for fine hand-embroidery. She would then visually translate these centuries-old embroidery techniques through loom weaving an abstracted 21st Century cosmic tableau in the form of her Longevity and Success samplers. Tsui often records the number of rows, stitches and hours involved, and shares these along with her detailed drawn grid patterns to reveal the mechanics of manual labour and the human element involved in handcrafted fabrication.
In cloud ribbon also Tsui pays tribute to earlier generations of Chinese art pioneers in Aotearoa: architect Ron Sang and artists, Guy Ngan and Wailin Elliott. A localised Chinese art history is revealed through her small blue beaded pictorials, depicting Ngan’s home, Elliott’s studio and kiln, and artist Brian Brake’s house which Sang designed. What comes to light is a celebration of domestic spaces that also nurture art-making specifically by Cantonese New Zealanders whose involvement in the arts is less recognised.
After working in the arts in Auckland, Tsui moved to the Coromandel Peninsula with her young family. It was here that Tsui got to know Wailin Elliott during an artist residency in 2023 at Driving Creek Railway and Pottery (the celebrated craft and conservation centre founded by artist Barry Brickell). With her studio based at Driving Creek, Elliott specialised in ceramics, painting and publishing, and was also a weaver. Both she and Tsui had extended family who shared the surname ‘Wong’ and ran fruit-shop businesses. This friendship would enable wider exposure of Elliott’s work through the Asian Aotearoa Arts programme and the Satellites Asian Arts Archive before she passed away in July 2024 at the age of 85.
Longevity Sampler (Detail, 2024), Kathryn Tsui. Photo: Sam Hartnett
Although of different generations, on different occasions Tsui and Elliott each described to me a desire for space and meditation in their practice including their conscious retreat away from urban centres (akin to pioneer women artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin). Elliott, along with her sister, the acclaimed writer Eva Ng, redefined what was possible as ‘a Chinese girl’ (as she would often refer to herself as), challenging the status quo to forge a path for her own radiant artist life. Tsui’s work re-examines social, historic and cultural conditions such as migration, translation, domestic craft and manual labour. Her pieces reimagine cross-cultural connections by pulling taut the loose threads of the past, towards a new and tactile cosmic order.
Words By Kerry Ann Lee
This essay was produced with the assistance of Creative New Zealand.
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Lead Image: Royal Wessex Teahouse, 2024, Kathryn Tsui. Photo: Sam Hartnett
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BIOS
Writer
Kerry Ann Lee is a visual artist, designer and scholar from Pōneke Wellington, New Zealand. As well as being Creative Director of the Asian Aotearoa Arts programme, Lee also founded the Red Letter Distro. She is well known for her work with independent arts publishing and fanzines over the past two decades, regularly working both nationally and internationally. Lee is an Associate Professor at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.
Artist
Kathryn Tsui (Cantonese-Chinese) is a textile artist who works primarily in loom weaving and beading and is based in Tairua in the Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand. An ongoing thread in her practice is a focus on mass-produced objects and patterns where Asian material culture has intersected with other traditions and influences. The result is a dialogue between notions of value and embedded socio-cultural hierarchies.
Tsui’s work is held in the public art collections of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, The Dowse Art Museum, the University of Waikato, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato and Tūhura Otago Museum. In 2023 she received a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant. She also works as an arts programmer and was one of the organisers of the first Chinese New Zealand Artists Hui in 2013. Tsui holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology (2007).
Instagram: @kathryntsui
Recent exhibition & events:
Kathryn Tsui solo exhibition ‘Opened Many Doors'
Masterworks Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
8 February - 1 March 2025
Weaving demonstration and Talk
For the Modern Women: Flight of Time exhibition
Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
23 February 2025
Upcoming exhibition
Aotearoa Art Fair
Viaduct Event Center
Auckland, New Zealand
Masterworks Gallery Booth
1-4 May 2025