2013-07-30

Powell Street Festival's Spatial Poetics XII: Release Me @ SFU Woodwards review


Reviewed by Shalon WH on Vandocument


Visual artist and musician Howie Tsui, performer Andrew Lee, and media artistSammy Chien’s experimentations with layered photographic histories, new media projections and live sounds exposes local colonial history in their piece The Unfortunates of D’arcy Island. Tsui, Lee, and Chien sit at a lengthwise table centre stage. Strewn over the table is a plethora of musical instruments, digital pedals, laptops and samplers. Unexpectedly, Howie plays a guitar at the far end of the table, and projected onto the screen are photographs of citizens of D’arcy Island (used as a leper colony for Chinese immigrants from 1894 to 1924).
Initially, I am made uncomfortable by Chien’s manipulations, as he plays with the footage live, super-imposing haunting auras onto the photographic evidence of the exiled Chinese Canadians. It seems to manipulate my own sense of belonging. Tsui and Lee, however, provide an arching soundscape that provides intermittent escape from the horrifying images. As Chien continues, I notice his live manipulations of the on-screen images also trigger terrifying noises. I start to ease into the terror and he becomes more dramatic, imposing layers of coloured auras, making the images oscillate and warp while Tsui and Lee also warp their melodies.
Howie Tsui, Spatial Poetics XII at SFU Woodwards, Vancouver BC 2013
work by Howie Tsui, photo courtesy the artist
The piece recalls the deeply deplorable history of exiled Chinese Canadian lepers sent to D’arcy Island between 1894 to 1924. The historical truth recounted by new media forms of storytelling, with live sound experimentations, could be understood as a comment on the contemporary realities of socio-spacial-economic separation, dislocation and isolation that is hardly unnoticeable outside the very doors of the performance space here in Vancouver.


see the full review:
http://vandocument.com/2013/07/spatial-poetics-xii-release-me-sfu-woodwards/