Ottawa-based artist Howie Tsui explores themes of subversion and cultural assimilation through a blend of traditional Asian imagery and Western underground aesthetics. Horror Fables presents his large paintings, made on paper in the form of Ming Dynasty scrolls, which conjure a phantasmagoria of creatures and everyday humans who populate fantastical landscapes. Tsui’s work is informed by a variety of dark subjects, such as Asian ghost stories, Buddhist hell scrolls, Hong Kong vampire films, and twentieth-century genocides such as the Nanking massacre. He describes the exhibition’s overarching theme as a struggle against “powerful, merciless structures, ” while also satirizing, in the broadist sense, the atmosphere of fear perpetrated in the West since 9/11 and captured in now-banal catch-phrases such as “axis of evil” or “war on terror”.