Entering The Roaming Peach Blossom Spring, Qiu Anxiong and Howie Tsui’s two-person exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery, British Columbia, felt like stepping into a surreal heterotopia—where the ancient past, present, and yet-to-come mix together. Tsui and Qiu both engage deeply with Eastern mythology, treating it not simply as a source of inspiration but as a set of rhetorical tools for reinterpreting historical texts and building imagined worlds. In the work of each artist, myth mediates reality and fiction, and combined with their incorporation of motifs and icons from pre-modern Chinese ink paintings, their mythological narratives create a timeless, spaceless atmosphere. From this position, they are able to consider the current political turmoil in Hong Kong and China, along with broader sociopolitical global issues of the contemporary world, while reinvigorating ink as a living, adaptable medium.
At the center of the gallery, Shanghai-based Qiu Anxiong’s ink-animation trilogy The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 1–3 (2006–17) was projected against an entire wall. Qiu has spent the last two decades reinterpreting Chinese ink painting, using Chinese mythology and science fiction as the foundation for his artistic universe and fluidly connecting the two genres. As he puts it, “Science fiction is [the] mythology of nowadays.” So although Qiu’s trilogy draws inspiration from Shan hai jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas)—a Chinese mytho-geographical compendium dating to the fourth century CE—the world he constructs is a near-future cyberpunk dystopia.
Qiu Anxiong, The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 1–3, 2006–17 (installation view). Photograph by Michael Love Photography.
Rather than directly referencing the mythical entities in Shan hai jing, Qiu adopts the underlying animistic worldview of the original classic. He depicts landscape in a traditional way that, at first glance, gives his images a Zen-like tranquility. Yet his images are also dystopic, with animated human and nonhuman inhabitants sharing scenes that reference nuclear detonations, ecological collapse, space colonization, and biotechnological surveillance. And his animated film includes iconic real-world, present-day locations—such as the Orientalist gate into the Berlin Zoological Garden, Jing’an Temple in Shanghai, and Hongya Cave in Chongqing, in combination with classical motifs of mountain and water from Chinese ink painting.
A series of woodblock prints featuring some of the mythical creatures from part 1 of the trilogy consist of an ink-styled illustration accompanied by short descriptions in classical Chinese. The vertical arrangement of the text on Xuan rice paper echoes the style of the original Shan hai jing. These prints provide viewers with a closer look at some of the strange creatures inhabiting Qiu’s mythological universe: an elephant battle tank, a giant fish submarine, and a turtle vehicle all evoke the machinery of warfare and industrialization.
In part 2 of The New Book of Mountains and Seas, Qiu illustrates the rise and collapse of a massive dam, its construction submerging towns and villages and its failure resulting in a catastrophic flood. Repeated imagery of the dam and villages alludes to the Three Gorges Dam project (Sanxia Daba), a hydroelectric gravity dam spanning the Yangtze River and promoted as the world’s largest power station to emphasize its progressive and social value. Qiu, born in Sichuan in the 1970s, witnessed the transformations surrounding the dam and the debates it sparked. This century-spanning infrastructure project has resulted in numerous irreversible ecological consequences and damage to historical sites, as well as the large-scale displacement of local communities. Alongside the visual narrative of the dam, part 2 of The New Book incorporates images of biological warfare and genetically modified animals. The catastrophic flood brings about the end of Earth, and the final scene of part 2—set against the backdrop of a dark, empty universe, and the earth moving away from the viewers—evokes a bleak and uncertain future. Qui’s work draws an effective parallel between ecological and societal suffering and state-and-corporate-driven overdevelopment.
Qiu Anxiong, The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 1–3, 2006–17 (installation view). Photograph by Michael Love Photography.
While Qiu cloaks his monochrome dystopias in Zen-like brushwork, Howie Tsui—a Canadian artist raised between Lagos, Nigeria, and Ontario’s Thunder Bay—constructs a more flamboyant, color-rich visual language. His abundant sources of inspiration range from Chinese folklore and mythology—such as the monsters in Shan hai jing—to Hong Kong horror films, Buddhist tales of hell, and Japanese yokai (monsters) culture, inviting viewers into a realm of absurdism.
Like Qiu’s work, Tsui’s compositions use the nonlinear narrative structures common in East Asian mythologies. The scenes within each of his compositions often shift abruptly from one moment to the next without a clearly defined linear progression, enhancing the dreamlike and episodic qualities of his visual storytelling. Tsui’s recurring cast of figures and other repeating motifs give his works their visual continuity.
Tsui’s richly detailed etching Jumbo (2024) is inspired by the real-life Jumbo Floating Restaurant in Hong Kong, a landmark that opened in 1976 and literally sank in 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this work, viewers find characters from Qiu’s previous series woven seamlessly into the complex, surreal scenes that define Tsui’s narrative world. Jumbo, abundant in grotesque and surreal scenes, recalls the famed twelfth-century Japanese ink hand scroll Chōjū jinbutsu giga (Scrolls of animal-person caricatures). Tsui transformed the sunken boat into a living hell where humans and monsters chaotically coexist. Some figures have their heads split open and their brains exposed to the air, while others have bodies grotesquely twisted and contorted. In one corner, a group of figures is engaged in a sword fight, while in the next scene, a man is boiled in a large pot. Although Tsui’s rich, speculative work is rooted in the mythological past, he, too, tells visual stories with contemporary resonance, referencing recent events in Hong Kong.
Howie Tsui, Jumbo, 2024 (installation view). Photograph by Michael Love Photography.
Wuxia fictions have become another focus of Tsui’s research in recent years. Named after wu (martial-arts skill) and xia (chivalrous virtue), wuxia narratives, which began gaining popularity in the early twentieth century, typically revolve around heroic martial artists whose extraordinary abilities propel the storyline. In Tsui’s Joyride (2018), a man resembling a scholar is dragged behind a horse ridden by an arrow-wielding warrior, while a mountainous ink landscape unfolds behind them. Joyride is a lenticular print on a light box, and so the scene shifts as the viewer moves, further amplifying the figures’ dramatic gestures.
Joyride draws inspiration from the 1985 Hong Kong TV series Yang’s Saga, which is based on The Generals of the Yang Family, a well-known Chinese folklore often interpreted as a patriotic narrative about the Yang family’s unwavering loyalty to the court. Tsui’s print, although bearing the ironic title Joyride, challenges this sanitized heroic image by vividly portraying the brutal violence and suffering behind the myth. The figure being dragged behind the horse is based on the TV character Yang Yanan, the third brother in the Yang family—and one of the heroic generals whose death is traditionally celebrated as noble and valiant. In Tsui’s visual narrative, however, he is depicted in a disturbingly vivid manner: His eyes bulge grotesquely from their sockets, his limbs and fingers contort at unnatural angles, and his garments hang in shreds, torn and tangled. In stark contrast, the mounted warrior dragging him holds his bow confidently, his posture radiating power, though his face is turned away, preventing viewers from discerning his expression. In this way, Tsui exposes the bloody reality behind the original tale.
Howie Tsui, Joyride, 2018 (installation view). Photograph by Michael Love Photography.
The wuxia genre is unified by a shared conceptual framework called jianghu—a loosely defined realm that exists beyond state control and an abstract metaphor for a parallel sociopolitical order. Tsui highlights wuxia’s critiques of authoritarianism and rebellious spirit while also deromanticizing the violence and suffering experienced by protagonists in their struggle for freedom—as seen in Joyride. Although the scene is drawn from the story of the Yang family generals, Tsui deliberately recasts the identity of the dragged figure as a bespectacled, book-carrying, emaciated scholarlike man. The same character also appeared in other works by Tsui; a review of a 2018 exhibition of the artist’s work points out the character’s resemblance to Lam Wing-kee, the Hong Kong bookseller who was detained and covertly transported across the border by mainland Chinese agents in 2015.
Through their distinct yet thematically resonant practices, Qiu and Tsui invited the viewers into the parallel universes they construct, where myth and reality converge, and the past seamlessly merges with the present, like a Möbius strip. The scenes depicted by Qiu and Tsui are beautiful yet illusory, absurd yet violent—reminiscent of the Buddhism notion of the Age of the Decline of the Dharma (in Sanskrit, saddharma-vipralopa), a period marked by moral decay, disorder, and the devaluation of human life. Their imagined visual worlds, all informed by premodern Chinese ink paintings, reject escapism, and instead vividly depict violence, murder, and horror. They challenge audiences to reflect on our present.
As visitors moved through the exhibition space, they were enveloped by the original soundtrack of Qiu’s New Book of Mountains and Seas. The lyrics incorporate a poem by the fifth-century Chinese poet Tao Yuanming. Although Tao lived during one of the most politically unstable periods in Chinese history, his poems are often interpreted as an expression of romantic pastoral withdrawal. (Part of the exhibition title, The Peach Blossom Spring, also comes from one of Tao’s most renowned short stories—a mediation on unattainable utopia.) Qiu translated and presented Tao’s lines in plain, unadorned English. Paired with the dystopian imagery crafted by both artists, the singer’s weathered and melancholic voice showed that the past is the present, reminding us that a grounded, stable connection to the environment, elusive even in Tao’s time, remains endangered:
No human being has their root on earth
As if they are ashes, floating in the air;
(As) the life sways in the wind,
You are no longer the self as you once were
