photographer: Danika Fanshawe
Bag portraits
1. redwhiteblue in twill, 2023
Mercerised
$1850
cotton, cotton, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 340mm x 285mm x 30mm
Bag portraits
1. redwhiteblue in twill, 2023 - DETAIL $1850
Mercerised cotton, cotton, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 340mm x 285mm x 30mm
2. redwhiteblue in plaid, 2023
$2250 Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 484mm x 327mm x 50mm
$2250
2. redwhiteblue in plaid, 2023 - DETAIL
Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 484mm x 327mm x 50mm
3. bluewhitered in twill, 2023
$2400 Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 550mm x 350mm x 55mm
3. bluewhitered in twill, 2023 - DETAIL $2400 Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 550mm x 350mm x 55mm
4. bluewhitered in plaid, 2023
$1850
Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 340mm x 340mm x 30mm
4. bluewhitered in plaid, 2023 - DETAIL $1850
Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, pine, framed 340mm x 340mm x 30mm
Woven bagforms
5. bluewhitered twill drawstring, 2023 $750
Mercerised cotton, cotton, cotton embroidery floss, recycled polyester thread
320mm x 280mm x 15mm (excludes handles)
6. redwhiteblue twill drawstring, 2023
$750 Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, cotton embroidery floss, recycled polyester thread 360mm x 340mm x 15mm (excludes handles)
7. surplus bagform with pocket, 2023
$750 Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread, recycled polyester thread 460mm x 180mm x 55mm
8. flatpack bagform, 2023
$750 Mercerised cotton, cotton, bamboo, cotton embroidery floss, recycled polyester thread, framing card 340mm x 210mm x 10mm
Glass bead woven necklaces
9. bluewhitered handle, 2023
VIEW 1
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread
390mm x 130mm x 3mm
$680
Glass bead woven necklaces
9. bluewhitered handle, 2023 – VIEW 2
$680 Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread 390mm x 130mm x 3mm
Glass bead woven necklaces
9. bluewhitered handle, 2023 - DETAIL
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread
390mm x 130mm x 3mm
$680
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread
10. lanyard, 2023
$680
450mm x 60mm x 3mm
10. lanyard, 2023 - DETAIL
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread
450mm x 60mm x 3mm
$680
11. tag, 2023
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread
460mm x 60mm x 3mm
$680
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread
11. tag, 2023 - DETAIL
$680
460mm x 60mm x 3mm
12. tote, 2023
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread
445mm x 60mm x 3mm
$680
12. tote, 2023 - DETAIL
$680
Japanese glass beads, waxed bead thread 445mm x 60mm x 3mm
Drawings
13. Red white blue study 03/01/2023, 2023
Colour pencil on graph paper; 210mm x 297mm
$350
14. Red white blue squares 12/01/2023, 2023
$350 Colour pencil on graph paper; 210mm x 297mm
15. Red white blue strap 16/01/02023, 2023
$350 Colour pencil on graph paper; 210mm x 297mm
16. Red white blue handle 20/01/2023, 2023
$350 Colour pencil on graph paper; 210mm x 297mm
Kathryn Tsui redwhiteblue towards a democratisation of making
Masterworks Gallery
18 February – 18 March 2023
Essay by Bronwyn LloydSix years ago, Kathryn Tsui relocated with her family from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to the township of Tairua on the Coromandel Peninsula. After working in the arts for a number of years – as gallery coordinator of Studio One Toi Tū in Ponsonby, and then as Curator of the Corban Estate Arts Centre in Henderson, the move to Tairua provided Tsui, an AUT fine arts graduate, with the time and opportunity to focus once again on her own art practice. In 2018 she developed an interest in weaving, which quickly turned into a passion, and the years since have seen her honing her considerable skills as a textile designer and loom weaver and professionalising her creative output.
She has gone on to set up a burgeoning art practice that includes commissions to make bespoke woven scarves and textiles for private clients as well as creating conceptually driven work for exhibitions in the dealer gallery and public arts sector. In the past two years Tsui’s weaving has featured in several group exhibitions: Ā Mua: New Lineages of Making curated by Karl Chitham for the Dowse Art Museum; the Raumati salon exhibition at Masterworks Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau; Soft Landings at Page Galleries in Pōneke Wellington, and Text Tile at Caves Gallery in Melbourne.
The title of Kathryn Tsui’s first solo exhibition at Masterworks Gallery offers us a clue towards understanding the important step she is taking to situate her weaving practice and consolidate her creative ideas.
redwhiteblue are the three colours of the garden-variety, two-dollar shop, plastic carry-all bag, commonly known as the ‘Hong Kong shopper’, which has been a recurring design inspiration for Kathryn Tsui’s creative work since 2018. The three colours are itemised and run together as a single word for the exhibition’s title, without capital letters. This simple typographical feature alerts us to the idea that no colour is more important than the other and that the dynamics of their coming together as one should be the focus of our attention. Hold that thought.
The second important clue is the arrangement of the works in the exhibition. Walls sectioned into large squares of redwhiteblue demarcate the hanging zones for Tsui’s beaded necklaces, woven bag forms, drawings rendered in coloured pencil on graph paper, and sets of beaded and woven pieces mounted together onto wooden stretchers. The method of hanging works of different kinds together in a grid is a deliberate act, and one that “democratises the process of exhibition making” Tsui points out. “By placing sculptural pieces, woven bag-forms, drawings and necklaces together, I am speaking to the hierarchies that have systematically devalued domestic craft forms practiced at home by women.”
redwhiteblue builds on Tsui’s thinking over a number of years about notions of value and the way in which time and labour-intensive craft activities like embroidery, cross-stitch, and weaving so often dovetail into ideas about inequality, exploitation, and the unsung and undervalued labour of women in the home. A collaborative cross-stitch project that Tsui completed with her mother Doris for an exhibition at Corban Estate Arts Centre in 2019 powerfully manifested this idea.
In the Amah Bag Project the mother and daughter team translated the plaid patterns of Hong Kong Shoppers into a body of cross stitched pieces. The resulting works cumulatively added up to 240 hours of combined labour and over 27,000 individual stitches. The word ‘Amah’ means domestic servant in Cantonese. The title of the project paid homage to Doris and Kathryn Tsui’s shared Chinese heritage, while at the same time the act of openly revealing the bald data associated with making the work operated as a pointed commentary, not only about unseen and undervalued domestic craft, but correlated more broadly, as Tsui points out, to “unpaid domestic labour and how it supports the whole economy. It’s not always about money,” she adds categorically, “it’s about value. ”
In Kathryn Tsui’s practice, the Hong Kong Shopper, or Amah Bag, becomes a loaded carry-all, rich with metaphorical associations, some of which reveal uncomfortable truths about racism, cultural stereotyping, economic disparity in society and gender inequality. “Politically,” Tsui notes, “I’m aware of the bag’s various common and derogatory names. Here in Aotearoa it is referred to as the ‘Samoan Suitcase’; in the UK it is the ‘Bangladeshi Bag’; in Germany it is the ‘Turkish Suitcase’; in Trinidad and Tobago it is ‘Guyanese Samsonite’, and in Zimbabwe, it’s called the ‘Ghana must go bag’. The plaid bags are a common sight in airports and at borders where they represent migration, both voluntary and involuntary.”
Early in the planning for redwhiteblue, Tsui envisaged that the exhibition would comprise a group of bags that would extend her thinking about the Hong Kong Shopper. Tsui is drawn to ancient, functional carrier forms, like Persian salt bags and saddle bags, but as she began to develop the idea, she quickly realised that designing new bags takes time, and that questions of form and function needed intense consideration. “Rather than make an exhibition of bags,” she concluded, “I decided to make an exhibition exploring the bag pattern, looking at the possibilities of abstraction stemming from an everyday object like the Amah bag.”
Intrigued by the origin story of the iconic Burberry Check, which was originally intended only as the bag and garment lining, but ended up defining the entire Burberry brand, Tsui started thinking about how a humble design can transform into something iconic. The ubiquitous Amah bag became her test subject.
She has substituted cross-stitch for weaving as the technique for producing the body of works for redwhiteblue, and her method has been to “unpack and reimagine the patterns” of the Hong Kong Shopper. Through drafting her designs on graph paper, Tsui is seeking to reclaim and reunite the role of weaver/designer in one person. This inclusive viewpoint was a position championed by the artist Tsui considers her greatest creative forebear: celebrated Bauhaus weaver/designer Anni Albers (1899-1994). Albers’ book On Weaving (1965) contains textile principles and design fundamentals, images of the artist’s own work alongside those of her contemporaries, exemplars of ancient weavings that inspired her, and thoughts on the design principles of weaving. It has been a profoundly valuable resource in Tsui’s weaving education, showing her how Albers tested the limits of structure in her work and pushed weaving in new directions as an artform deserving of respect. Tsui’s indebtedness to Albers’ design and thinking is reflected through the inclusion of her working drawings in the democratic arrangement for redwhiteblue, which enable her to “actively show the design process.” “To treat the bag pattern as a revered tartan,” Tsui goes on to explain, “I have woven the pattern in 2/2 twill, which is the traditional tartan weave. In some works the fabric is handwoven in plain or tabby weave in the same weave as the original Amah bags.”
Tsui acknowledges that while weaving is a craft skill that is less labour-intensive than cross-stitch, it nevertheless “takes intensive planning and calculation before I even get to the loom,” she explains. “It then takes up to two days to prepare the loom for weaving. Sometimes I wonder why I’m drawn to labour-intensive craft forms like weaving,” she muses. “I’m not a patient person! I think it’s because weaving keeps on giving to my practice in different ways.”
Tsui’s weaving practice expanded unexpectedly through a serendipitous gift from fellow artist Finn McCahonJones. He gave her a rigid heddle loom formerly owned by renowned lacemaker Alwynne Crowsen (1928-2020), co-founder of the Auckland Embroiderers and Lacemakers Guild. Over the Christmas period, Tsui taught herself bead weaving on Crowsen’s loom, using beads of red, white, and blue, and in the process, she discovered that the addition of bead weaving to her practice moved her developing body of work in an exciting new direction:
“Where the Amah Bag Project recreated and honoured the bag pattern, the bead weaving is another step. It gave me flexibility and freedom. The bead works are like weaving draft notations. I love the way that the pattern constantly collapses into other patterns.”
A series of framed works in redwhiteblue are described by Tsui as ‘bag portraits’. They are woven fibre translations of the Hong Kong Shopper design in various sizes. A strap handle made of woven beads is attached to the works, hanging down in a U formation. While this gives the bag portraits the appearance of the flat-packed originals we find on the shelf in the Two-Dollar Shop, the beaded handles are a novel twist that conceptually transforms the familiar design from a uniform object into a bespoke article.
“I think of the mounted works with beaded strap forms as portraits,” Tsui explains. “Through bead weaving, I became interested in representing the bag strap handle, perhaps the least durable part of the Amah bags. I wanted to preserve it and elevate it in a way, so I redesigned the plaid of the bag in the handles as a kind of sampler of possible pattern ways.”
Tsui’s formulation of the concept of ‘bag portraits’ is a subtle variation of Anni Albers’ method of distinguishing between the functional pieces and the purely aesthetic articles in her practice as a textile artist, those that were ‘not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at’. She came up with the term ‘pictorial weavings’ in order to assert that the works were entirely at liberty to ‘find a form themselves to no other end than their own orchestration’ [1].
It is noteworthy that Kathryn Tsui also uses the word ‘form’ as an adjunct to the simple nouns titling her pieces in redwhiteblue. This creates a compelling sense of ambiguity among the body of work. For example, we see a necklace that looks a bit like a bag. Then we see a similar beaded piece transformed into a ‘handle’ on a functionless version of the traditionally functional Hong Kong Shopper We see a bag that isn’t really a bag but a kind of soft sculpture, semi-functional, at least to the extent that it is stuffed with the accumulated waste generated through the weaving process. In fact, the more we scrutinise the grid of work in redwhiteblue, the more ambiguities abound.
Tsui’s connection to her Chinese and Hong Kong heritage is ever present in her work, not only in the resonance of the familiar bag that inspired the body of work itself, but through subtle inclusions that add culturally specific, often symbolic resonances to the work. There is the cobalt blue of the beads that recall the colour so familiar to us in traditional Chinese porcelain, or the presence of bamboo fibre among the materials used in her weaving. “Bamboo in Chinese culture symbolises prosperity,” she notes, “and beads are signs of wealth and status”.
Let’s circle back to the thought I asked you to hold so patiently near the start of this piece, so that we can see where we have landed in terms of our understanding of Kathryn Tsui’s move towards a democratisation of making. If we recall the inventive play with the dynamics of pattern and colour inherited from the Bauhaus and modernist artists of yesteryear, apply a Chinese cultural context and lens to our looking, and take our cue from an arrangement of work that disavows outdated notions that particular forms of creative expression have greater ‘value’ than others, I think we are now equipped with the tools of our engagement with Kathryn Tsui’s remarkable exhibition redwhiteblue.
1. Ann Coxon and Maria Müller-Schareck, ‘Anni Albers: A Many-Sided Artist’, in Ed’s, Ann Coxon et al. Anni Albers. CT: Yale UP (2018: p.13).
Kathryn Tsui graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Sculpture) from Auckland University of Technology (2007). She is of Chinese descent, and she lives in Tairua, Coromandel Peninsula with her family where she practices as an artist and loom weaver. Her work has featured in various group exhibitions throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Recent exhibitions include; Ā Mua: New Lineages of Making at The Dowse Art Museum, and Text Tile, Caves Gallery, Melbourne. Her work is held in the art collections of The Dowse Art Museum and the University of Waikato, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato.
Dr Bronwyn Lloyd graduated with a PhD in English from the University of Auckland in 2010. She is an avid crafter and collector of applied arts, and she works as a freelance curator and art writer. As the Blumhardt Curator (2021) she curated an exhibition of contemporary wool craft for Petone Settlers Museum (March – October 2002), and she staged a solo exhibition of needlepoint charms called The Search Party at McCahon House Museum (JulyNovember 2022). She currently works part time as an archivist and researcher at Objectspace.
Kathryn Tsui Artist CVPUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Dowse Art Museum
University of Waikato – Te Whare o Wananga Waikato
SOLO EXHIBITION
redwhiteblue, Masterworks Gallery, Auckland, 18 February to 18 March 2023
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Soft Landing, Page Galleries, Wellington, 24 February to 19 March 2022
Text Tile, Caves Gallery, Melbourne - Australia, 24 June -16 July 2022
Summer Salon, Masterworks Gallery, Auckland, November to January 2022
Ā Mua: New Lineages of Making, The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, 4 April to 26 July 2020
Labour of Body, Corban Estate Arts Centre, Auckland, 26 July to 15 September 2019
Art Store, Cement Fondu, Sydney - Australia, 25 May to 21 July 2019
Subsets: Sets and Pairs from the University of Waikato Art Collection, Calder & Lawson Gallery, University of Waikato, 2016
PRESS
Art feature, HERE Magazine, February 2023 Issue
Radio Interview with Lynn Freeman, Standing Room Only, Radio New Zealand, March 2022
Artist Profile, ‘EDUCATING IN THE CRAFTS – THE GLOBAL EXPERIENCE’, edited by Lindy Joubert and published by Springer, 2022
Artist Profile, homestyle magazine, June - July 2020 Issue
RESIDENCIES
Blumhardt Foundation, May 2020 Driving Creek, 2023
EDUCATION
Bachelor of Art and Design (Visual Arts - Sculpture)
AUT University, Auckland, 2007, Art and Design Academic Scholarship – 2006, 2007