Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw at Towards

Artist: Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw

Exhibition title: Loose Leaves

Venue: Towards, Toronto, Canada

Date: December 16, 2023 – February 3, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Towards, Toronto

Towards is pleased to present Loose Leaves, an exhibition of new works by Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw.

Within his practice, Shaw tracks the evolution of civic landscapes. Interpreting cycles of fragility, vanishment and regeneration in urban space, his works bricolage fragments of the shifting settings he inhabits. Shaw studies neighborhoods in flux, redeveloping industrial sites and dynamic infrastructure typologies. In doing so, he contemplates perfunctory, and oftentimes overlooked, facets of the built environment. Synthesizing distorted replicas of such details, Shaw addresses the furnishings which backdrop public life. These works paraphrase environmental shifts, exploring how contemporary aspirations and cultural ideals mold the stages upon which everyday gestures are performed. Through approaches to modelling, sceneography and museological display, Shaw elaborates upon the surreal undertones of metropolitan banalities.

This latest series of reliefs and engravings on panel illustrate Shaw’s early investigations of Hong Kong-style cafés or ‘cha chaan teng’ (‘tea restaurant’ in Cantonese). Amalgamating elements of Chinese cuisine, with that of Western diners, these establishments exemplify a plaiting of Hong Kong and British culture – illustrated through Canto-western dishes, milk-based teas and café architecture. Using culinary and decorative symbols, Shaw questions how cha chaan teng illuminate certain aspects of Hong Kong identity. In particular, he explores the ways these establishments have made once imperviable forms of colonial culture readily accessible, through acts of facsimile, appropriation and reinvention. Contemplating how mimetic models can be utilized to agitate cultural partitions, Shaw demonstrates the dismantling of old categories – and the emergent forms reconstituted from their remnants.

Loose Leaves specifically focuses on foreclosed and operational Hong Kong cafés located within metro Vancouver, intertwined with renderings of local public transit systems. Referencing historical conceptions of the ‘tea house’, alongside contemporary transportation services, the exhibition centers on themes of congregation, discourse, and mediated perceptions of social life. Shaw’s works draw from online customer review portals and transportation message boards, observing how residents catalogue their private experiences within public forums (ie. culinary assessments and spatial mapping) and speculate upon future developments within the physical spaces they inhabit (ie. fictionalized transit routes and models).