Game On: Arnold Tsang 曾昭雋:「Chill 」的人生攻略

English 英 : DEIRDRE KELLY | Chinese 中 : 文禮 CHRISTINA LI

VENUE: Fête Chinoise Studio · ART DIRECTION: Deborah Lau-Yu | COORDINATION: Christina Li · PHOTOGRAPHY: Ruizhou Li, Fête Chinoise | ATTIRE: Capsule Markham · EYEWEAR: Ola Optical at Times Square | IMAGES: Courtesy of Arnold Tsang, Blizzard Entertainment

NFT arts created by azuki

NFT art created by azuki

A rnold Tsang says that he wasn’t one of the cool kids growing up. But he’s definitely cool now. Perhaps even the coolest. Okay, at forty, kid might not be the right moniker here. But cool? Oh yeah. Let us count the ways.

One: he creates NFTs, not just any NFTs, but kickass Azukis, said to be the sixth biggest selling profile picture NFT of all time (more on what that all means later). 

Two: he made his international reputation as the character art director for Overwatch, Blizzard Entertainment’s global blockbuster video game that now has a Canadian hero and a futuristic map of Toronto as part of its imaginary universe, and all because of him. 

Three: when not doing new media art, he plays amateur guitar in a pickup band inspired by Japanese rock, which is so cool it’s red hot.

Question: How did a self-described introvert end up becoming a digital world sensation?

Answer: By remaining fearless in the face of the unknown.

As Tsang tells it, speaking from his home in California, every venture he has explored in life has been predicted by a willingness to follow the path less taken, trusting in the journey. Dreaming big is his road guide, an unerring belief in his own abilities, the gas in his tank. “I don’t call myself adventurous,” he says, so softly and modestly you must lean in to listen. “But,” Tsang continues, adjusting his glasses, “I don’t have many reservations when it comes to jumping into the unknown.”

Bruce lee Nft art clip created by arnold tsang

This rather straightforward approach comes from a superhero from his youth. Not a fantasy figure, but the flesh-and-blood Chinese actor and martial arts expert Bruce Lee whose utterance of a phrase in a 1970s American TV show has come to define a desirable state of mind: “Be water, my friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.” Tsang first heard these words while watching the small screen when young and impressionable and has never forgotten them. The words, “Be water,” guide how he lives his life and chooses his creative projects. “Some people have a plan, I have a flow,” he explains. “No matter what happens, I know I can make it work.”

Be Water, My Friend! 水既柔且剛，狀可因容器而轉，形可應氣溫而變，面對任何境況，以無法為有法，以無限為有限。李小龍「Be Water（如水無形）」的人生哲學啟發了知名電玩概念藝術家曾昭雋(Arnold)以此為題，巧妙地運用李小龍上善若水的處世哲學，配合開放去中心化的NFT市場模式，創作了加密藝術品(NFT)，參與去年美國一個反亞裔種族仇恨活動籌款。

salvador dali art clip created by arnold tsang

假如你是電玩迷、熱衷漫畫、留意最新數碼藝術，Arnold應該是一個熟悉的名字。十六歲入行，從漫畫勾線助手、攀到人氣電玩遊戲的首席角色設計師、再成為暢銷的NFT創作人，憑創意及巧手馳騁廿多個年頭。一般人強調計劃的重要，他卻喜歡隨心而行：「由於行業嶄新，沒有先例、沒有藍圖，每天需要一次又一次的嘗試，走過一關又一關的未知。只要信念夠強，一定可以走下去。」就是無畏無懼，如水無形，成就了非凡的Arnold。

Where has the flow taken him? Tsang, storyteller that he is, effortlessly weaves a narrative. Once upon a time, he was born in Hong Kong to Chinese parents who immigrated to Canada when he was just six months old. The close-knit family settled in Toronto’s multicultural east end, where a younger brother soon followed. They entertained themselves by drawing and making their own comic books, wholly supported by their parents who bucked the stereotype in allowing their children to pursue art as a career. His mother, an amateur ceramicist, fostered the pursuit of the creative life. And yet Tsang didn’t know that he wanted to be an artist full-time. For a shy kid like him, the high school art room was more refuge than calling, the one place where he felt comfortable expressing himself with a pencil on paper. “I just really enjoyed doing it,” he says. “I liked the process of improving the skill set and looking at cool art and understanding it. I really never thought of it as a career. Not then anyway.”

At the beginning, he drew likenesses of the animated characters he discovered and loved in Japanese live-action comic books, which he watched at home, translated into Cantonese, on the family TV set. A trip to Hong Kong when he was ten had first introduced him to the genre. He became instantly hooked after an uncle took him and his brother to the cinema to watch Dragon Ball, an anime film based on a manga, or graphic novel originating in Japan. “It blew my mind,” Tsang recalls. “I wanted to be a Japanese animator. I became a Japanophile.”

Street fighter art cover by arnold tsang, 2003

While still in high school, he parlayed his skills into a job at Dreamwave, the Canadian company (now defunct) which had a highly successful run with the Transformers franchise. Tsang had captured the attention of the company’s founder when he appeared at Comicon, an annual comic book and pop culture convention, flogging a copy of his own self-produced comic book. Hired practically on the spot, Tsang entered Dreamwave as a penciller and eventually worked his way up to colourist. At age eighteen and with a few friends, Tsang co-founded UDON (named for the noodle), a comics book-based entertainment company which secured the licence for the X-Men Evolution comics as well as the Street Fighter franchise. This was a chance development that ended up having a huge impact on his future career. “The art from Street Fighter,” Tsang says, “has had the biggest influence on my work.”

Realizing he could make a living at it, Tsang enrolled at Ontario’s Sheridan College, one of the world’s top-rated animation schools. At Sheridan, he studied classical animation with people who had worked for Disney and Nelvana; from these established animators, Tsang learned how to animate hand-drawings using cameras and film. His was the last class to learn these old school techniques before everything went digital in 2005. This could have resulted in a professional handicap, but for a go-with-the-flow kind of guy like Tsang it represented instead an opportunity to acquire a new skill set. Tsang threw himself into studying computer animation on his own, and as luck would have it, in 2006, just as he was immersing himself in the new technology, he received a call from a fellow Sheridan alumnus, then working at Korean gaming company Webzen, inviting him to join him in Seoul. Talk about a leap into the unknown – new country, different language, first time living away from home… But at age twenty-three, and without much hesitation, Tsang decided to take a chance, believing it to be an opportunity to “create content that bridges Eastern and Western styles of art.” Today, nearly twenty years later, he calls Korea “my biggest break. It’s where I discovered I could do this as a career.” The Seoul job also ended up being “a lot of fun,” whetting Tsang’s appetite for greater creative adventures. 

art by arnold tsang

只想不幹 一事無成

有時過份瞻前顧後，只會錯失良機。與其憑空憂慮，不如行動吧！世界上沒有勝利的唯一方式，只有不放棄的去嘗試，才會最後有機會成功！Arnold很早已經明白這道理。十歲的時候迷上日本動畫《七龍珠》，從此自製漫畫就成為他與弟弟的課餘娛樂。因為喜歡美術，自小立志成為日系漫畫師；高中時 ，向多倫多漫畫出版社毛遂自薦，結果獲知名漫畫家Pat Lee收為旗下Dreamwave的勾線助手；到大學期間轉投多倫多UDON工作室，與團隊共同創作了漫畫版《街頭霸王》，更為角色繪畫了許多耳熟能詳的插圖。他分享：「我十分喜歡《街頭霸王》的遊戲，當年能參與這個項目可說是夢想成真，你可能會發現我的作品一路滲透那霸王的DNA！」

art by arnold tsang

Emboldened by this unexpected undertaking, in 2007 he was ready to leap again, this time to Shanghai where he joined Red 5 Studios, founded by ex-Blizzard developers, to work on the game Firefall. Shanghai, where he stayed until 2010, was something of a turning point for him, both personally and professionally. It’s where he met and fell in love with his future wife (and mother of his two young children) and where he mastered new ways of virtual storytelling. 

With comics, Tsang was used to realizing a narrative in visual form and designing characters to elicit an emotional response. But with video games, he was creating virtual vessels for players to embody, avatars which enabled them to experience a wondrously dynamic world. “It’s a very different muscle,” Tsang  explains, “and it has to work with game engine limitations, gameplay design as well as character design to support a game that needs to be fun and engaging for it to work.” Studying classical animation, he adds, taught him the basics of some of these video game techniques. “I learned in tandem what makes a compelling narrative.”

Armed with these new skills, Tsang moved next to California where in 2010 he took a job with Blizzard, first as a lead character concept artist, and later as assistant art director. His portfolio included Overwatch and Overwatch 2; considered among the greatest video games of all time. Enlisted to Blizzard’s innovative Team 4, Tsang was part of a maverick group of developers formed to create Titan, a next generation massively multiplayer online game (MMO). That project never came to fruition but it was an incredible learning experience.“Blizzard always was the standard for quality,” Tsang says, “and so working there wasn’t just learning how the sausages were made. It was a dream come true, truly amazing. The people, the passion, the dedication to the craft and the ability when something wasn’t great to use the resources to shift and chase after the quality … I felt really lucky just being there.”

堅守信念 成就夢想

儘管前路充滿未知，只要堅守信念，結果比想像的更精彩。大學畢業時期，正值2D動畫轉型至3D年代，令Arnold對前路感到迷茫。機緣巧合下，他從朋友口中得知韓國一間電玩遊戲製作室正在聘請兼具東西方風格的繪畫師，從未想過加入電玩行業的Arnold決定一試，從此奠定了往後的人生。因為參與電玩項目關係，他到過蘇格蘭、首爾、上海多個城市工作交流，現定居於美國加州，於遊戲業龍頭暴雪娛樂(Blizzard Entertainment)曾任職遊戲首席角色設計師，參與過6,000萬玩家註冊的人氣射擊遊戲《鬥陣特攻Overwatch》第一、二代的開發，他說：「在遊戲內捍衛和平的溫斯頓、閃光、小美與源氏等角色，都是我與團隊花了多年、嘔心瀝血的設計，由衣著、武器、性格、造型至面部表情都一絲不苟。」在《鬥陣特攻》第二代，Arnold更在設計中加插了多倫多的場景及代表加拿大的角色，一解他思鄉之情！

Overwatch 2 Toronto Scene

Blizzard was just as lucky to have him. Overwatch, the multiplayer shooter game it’s most famous for, creates a world on the brink of anarchy where “an elite international task force is charged with ending the war and restoring liberty to all nations.” A global perspective is built right into the concept and Tsang, having grown up in multicultural Toronto, knew exactly how to enhance it. Responsible for character designs and visual art for both games, Tsang created an eclectic cast of players representative of a wide range of ethnicities, nationalities, skin colours, conforming and non-conforming genders. Digital esports publication DBLTAP called Overwatch “one of the most diverse video games in history.”

Tsang is proud of that achievement and credits the city where he grew up for helping to make it happen. “Multinational Toronto, which is where I lived until my early twenties,  had a huge influence on who I am,” Tsang says. “It was an inspiration and it led me to create a game world that’s better because of diversity.” This is how Toronto ended up being on Overwatch’s world of maps. “I was curious to know what our art team could do with Toronto,” Tsang explains, “and we landed on a couple of things to create a visual look — Nathan Phillips Square which we futurized and sci-fied up a bit, adding in the CN Tower, winter, red maple leaves and the Canadian flag added to the mix.” Tsang also created a Canadian character. “We’re making a game about characters from different countries and yet how can we not have a character from our own country, Canada? It was weird not to have one. I always wanted a hero from Canada and finally we got one.” Sojourn, as she is called, is a former member of the Canadian military, special forces division, who grew up in Toronto where she received cybernetic upgrades to her arms, legs and brain. It is presumably where she got her platinum hair as well. Anyway, she’s a great leader, a brilliant tactician and one of the last things Tsang did before bidding Blizzard goodbye earlier this year.

捨易取難 遇強越強

很多人都甘於安逸，但成功的人往往比一般人更能承受困難，能夠抵擋磨折的人，最後才可以擁有真正的幸福。2022年，Arnold選擇離開工作十二年的暴雪娛樂，全職加入初創公司Chiru Labs。同年初Chiru為他的創作《Azukis》發行了8,700 個NFT，以創新的日系動漫風格造成哄動，在開賣短短三分鐘內迅速售罄，收入超過2,900萬美元； 發行的首四個星期內，《Azukis》在OpenSea等幾個主要NFT市場的交易量接近3億美元，目前地板價約8,000美元，持有者超過4,700人，一度榮登NFT市場上排名第六大交易量之藝術家。

到底什麼是NFT呢？為何個別NFT創作能吸引藏家、藝術愛好者購買，迅速飆出天價？NFT是Non-fungible Token的簡寫，意思是非同質化代幣，它跟比特幣一樣，是一種以區塊鏈作為背景技術的虛擬資產。不同於比特幣，每個NFT都是獨一無二的數位藝術創作，可以是圖片、聲音或影像等不同形式。每件NFT具有不可替代的「唯一性」；亦因為它的獨一無二，因此彼此無法互相取代，也不能再分割成更小的交易單位。原本在網路時代，數位藝術品可以低成本的方式進行完全相同的複製，但當結合NFT科技後，因為背後區塊鏈的技術支持，任何記錄將永久保存，更無法刪除或竄改加密藝術品的原創作者、轉手交易紀錄，並且所有資料公開可見，能夠完全保障創作者的「追及權(the Resale Royalty Right)」，其限量、記名和持有紀錄等特性亦賦予數位內容收藏意義。對藏家而言，除了收藏價值，更能滿足在社群中品味及擁有權的宣示，累積社交資本。

根據Arnold透露，除了NFT發售，Chiru未來還計劃開拓線下街頭服飾品牌店、舉辦見面會和音樂節現場活動等；種種附加價值、線上線下互動、及專享，令擁有《Azukis》NFT可以變得很cool!

In a blaze of publicity, Tsang quit the company that was his creative home for the past twelve years to leap again into the unknown. His latest venture is Azuki, the digital brand known for its collection of 10,000 NFTs on the decentralized Ethereum blockchain. As its name implies, Azuki are little red beans disguised as youth culture rebels who skate the Internet. They are outsiders, prone to taking risks, and alarming the Establishment, much like NFTs themselves, a pandemic-era phenomenon sold in virtual marketplaces, using the same blockchain ledger technology as cryptocurrencies. So far, they’re a roaring success.

Listed as the sixth most successful set of NFTs of all time, the Azukis have collectively sold in the millions since its release this past January via Web3, a cryptocurrency-integrated Internet owned by users, not big tech. Each anime-styled character originally sold for $3,400 (US) before rising to as much as $500,000 (US) on the secondary market. In one month, according to a published report, Azuki NFTs surpassed $300 million in transaction volume. Chiru Labs, a mostly anonymous group of digital entrepreneurs headquartered in Los Angeles, mints the NFTs, receiving a five percent royalty on any Azuki resold. Tsang is one of the only members of the group to be publicly identified. Besides designing the unique avatars, which he did in his spare time, his role is to push Azuki forward with the creation of apparel and more. “Some people think NFTs are a scam, and to be honest, there are a lot of scammers out there. But NFTs also have the potential to shape what's ‘cool’ for the next decade. I want to be on the side that shows the potential of this strange, new, culture-defining medium." No wonder he’s involved.

Yet, as many people will know from just reading the day’s headlines, crypto is volatile, as are the tokenized assets associated with it. NFTs are up big and then they are down big, and then up, and oops, back down again as noted when NFT sales hit a twelve-month low because of the cryptocurrency crash that occurred in June, wiping out billions in a blink of an eye. The cool factor aside, the risks are real, making NFTs one helluva roller coaster ride for investors and creators. And yet Tsang is betting his future on them. Is he worried?  “Be water,” he calmly responds, leaving no doubt that with this latest dive into the unknown he’ll come up swimming.

面對未知 安然自若

NFT對創作者和藝術家來說，是一項開創性的技術，打開了一篇更大的交流分享空間； 不過，虛擬市場充滿未知且市場波幅不定。對此，Arnold選擇相信自己的選擇，對前景保持樂觀。「很多人認為NFT市場純為炒作，市場上亦有不少詐騙；但NFT潛力非常，將會帶動未來潮流尖端。我希望能成為這種創新、異類文化的推手。」Arnold始終保持一貫的安然自若（chill）的態度，面對洪水猛獸，只是一笑帶過。越chill越接近知足常樂，這就是Arnold的闖關攻略。

SPonsored by FERRIS WHEEL PRESS

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