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...
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