Profile: Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw

In the beginnings of the industrial era in Western Europe, cities became the primary hubs for all aspects of life–the production of raw materials became centralized through machinic automation, and for the first time, agrarian labour was less valued than factory work. This mass migration to cities to seek employment and participate in the advancing manufacturing landscape was the distinguishing precursor to the modern infrastructures and economies that we engage in today. With the mass-deployment of artificial intelligence now entering the contemporary sphere, the materials to be processed are no longer raw or crude but are abstracted into what philosopher and scholar Nick Land called “machinic desire.”¹ If industry, and therefore capitalism, now enables the abstract manufacturing of desire as the ultimate product, then what symbolic significance still remains in the physical materials and conceptual frameworks found in our cities’ peripheries?

In light of these questions, it remains a challenge to hold such expectations of procuring meaning from material alone. However, the sculptural practice of Berlin-based Canadian artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw rises to reignite a passion for materiality. Often taking the form of enlarged maquettes, his sculptures depict peculiar machinery or undefinable instruments from another time. My first introduction to his work was his solo exhibition, “Vinegar Stone & the Language of Flowers,” at Towards in Toronto in 2017, in the subterranean gallery space they shared with Franz Kaka on Wade Avenue in the Junction. I remember being struck by the ambitiousness of the installation and its intricacy; Shaw’s proficiency was instantly apparent. 

The exhibition was immersive, featuring sculptures seemingly unearthed from a medieval civilization that had been restored for viewing: three small framed boxes patinated with age lined the back wall. Meanwhile, a classic pharmacy cross beckoned between the divided gallery spaces, its opposite side illustrating a human figure twisted in an unnatural position against a flocked dark green background. The centre of the gallery was occupied by a naive wheelbarrow made from an old laundry sink and a crude arrangement of dowels tied with twine, which formed handles and a front wheel. Offerings of dried flowers and an arrangement of coins speckled a pool of vinegar in the sink’s interior, like alms for an unknown deity. I remember feeling that the overarching energy of the exhibition was somewhat sour. The threat of rot and decay loomed like a shadow over each work, sometimes symbolically (with the inclusion of motifs such as clock faces) but also in the fermented palette of patinated ochres, moldy browns, and murky greens. As though exhumed from a soggy medieval world of lore, the exhibition balanced this ripeness with the artist’s well-honed proficiency in casting and assembling, provoking the viewer to act as an archeologist in resolving the true forms or sources of the found materials. Even in his newer works, it is in these decisions that I find Shaw’s practice so poignant for understanding the evolving abstraction of material and technology in these times.

Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, on Treaty 6 territory, Shaw spent time in Vancouver, first studying at Emily Carr University, before moving to Europe to complete an MFA at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. He’s been living and working in Berlin for about ten years. The artist’s time across varied landscapes has left traces of local materials, geographies, and infrastructures, which have, in turn, permeated his practice. In an artist talk at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2023, he introduced his work by describing his curiosity around city borders and the transient edges between urban infrastructures and the natural landscape—the nebulous terrain of junctures and psychogeographies.² For Shaw, these liminal spaces often exist on the periphery of city limits, where plots of land, whether publicly or privately owned, collect both material and conceptual debris. Sites such as train and shipyards, construction sites, abandoned buildings awaiting development permits, and even diasporic immigrant neighbourhoods like Chinatowns have all left their mark on his work. 

Shaw’s sculptures take the form required to communicate his personal encounters and experiences within various sites. Working three-dimensionally, his sculptures occasionally assume the form of a diorama, in which wall-mounted maquettes present a multi-dimensional view into simultaneously archaic and futuristic environments. In his solo exhibition “Loose Leaves,” which opened in late 2023 at Towards, the gallery walls are lined with intricately designed dioramas and slate-grey menus embossed with the daily specials from Hong Kong-style cafés across the Lower Mainland. Each piece is intricately carved and assembled from MDF and wood. In Gloucester Composite (2023), the artist transforms a food truck into the back alleyway of an urban restaurant, foregrounding the commercial dumpster, which, when painted a flat light grey, suddenly resembles a computer microchip. Other works, such as Maxim’s Composite (2023), fuse a deconstructed laptop keyboard with the storefront of a restaurant, featuring Chinese characters on the technological grey sign embossed above a series of dirty windows. In SkyTrain I and II (2023), two rectangular panels playfully depict a passenger commuter train looping around the edges of their frames. By dissecting and recomposing the built environments of Vancouver’s Chinatown with remnants of technological devices, the artist deftly combines our contemporary desire to traverse and explore neighbourhoods virtually with the inimitable and often untranslatable qualities that are the result of decades of brick and mortar cultural perseverance. 

Speaking with the artist on the phone over the past few months, I was interested to hear that his latest body of work–“Instrument Cluster,” a solo exhibition presented last summer at Galeria Wschód in Warsaw–was inspired by the open-pit oil sands mine and bitumen upgrading site called Mildred Lake, located about 40 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. The land is privately owned by an oil-refining company called Syncrude, which is a jointly-owned partnership of four companies. The project’s website describes the site as providing “a replacement supply of bitumen for upgrading when the current North Mine approaches the end of its oil sands deposit.”³ Since the area is closed to the public, the artist used aerial satellite footage of the landscape as reference, discovering dense configurations of strange machinic forms and figures, formations that inspired the sculptures in this new exhibition. 

Utilizing a subdued and earthy palette, the sculptures—both wall-mounted and arranged like architectural maquettes on a low central platform—feature dusty ochres, metal greys, and rusty terracottas, combining to form a miniature orchestra of machines. Mainly made from MDF, wood, cardboard, plastic, and newsprint, the sculptures come together by way of wood glue, joint compounds, and wood filler, and are coloured with aqueous pigments and varnish. This process produces a semi-transparent and satiny finish that obscures the surfaces’ material identity, making it hard to discern wood from metal or paper. Compelling in their defiance of obvious material origins, the sculptures resemble heavy machinery, tools, and analogue instruments of ineffable purpose. 

Towers (2025) resembles a fantastical refining machine or perhaps a section of the subterranean reservoir used by an ancient civilization, while the shape of Giants (2025) resembles what could be an antiquated dump truck. The initial intrigue of these works arises from their uncanny familiarity, but perhaps their most enduring quality lies in the mystery of their making. Shaw describes his process as both tedious and repetitive, beginning once he has conceived the forms, which result from a combination of material scraps, found objects, and reference images drawn from the sites he’s interested in working with. Once the form is defined, he begins construction, cutting, sanding, and gluing materials together, which are then refined and transformed into a singular entity. Sometimes this involves a mould-making and casting process, and other times, as in X-T4 / GR1s 35 – hybrid (2025), it requires meticulous assembly of many cut pieces to form an absurdly long analogue/digital hybrid camera affixed to the wall. Always frozen in stasis, the tools of the artist’s arsenal render themselves unhelpful allies to the viewer’s insatiable curiosity to determine their purpose. 

Like an amalgamation of technology in a dream, Shaw expertly conflates the often overlooked forms of machines and instruments of everyday life, with a special affinity for the analogue, industrial, and otherwise mundane infrastructure and debris that permeate our contemporary and cluttered world. Viewing his work is a journey through time: from the often archaic peculiarities of his objects to the ways they transform our understanding of the materials, inviting us to engage with their final forms. Understanding the artist’s environmental inspirations reveals that perhaps his most perennially returned-to forms are openings–doorways, clock faces, viewfinders, windows, or archways. These liminal spaces, however, are defined by tensions and dichotomies: a strategy Shaw uses to compress time, making his objects feel both ancient and present.

Mediated by cultural projections, human encounters, and physical forces such as friction, decay, and material entropy, Shaw’s sculptures propel the viewer into action, prompting us to piece together their makings like an archeologist. As static as they first appear, their ingenuity ignites our human desire to project narrative onto the insentient, secretly hoping their mechanical origins will be revealed and their true functions finally discovered. In this way, his work performs a kind of contemporary alchemy, transubstantiating the semi-forgotten debris and formal structures of heavy industry into maquettes to be rediscovered and reanimated anew. Like the relics of a long-lost civilization buried beneath eons of matter, Shaw’s artworks patiently await their time to be shaped and activated by entropy and the willing observer. Through them, he manufactures desire from the ruins of our contemporary detritus and the spaces of our post-industrial peripheries.

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Lauren Lavery is a writer, artist, and editor. She is the Associate Director at Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver and the Editor of Peripheral Review, an independent, non-profit platform for documenting and expanding the emerging and under-represented Canadian art scene. She has published art writing for Contemporary Art Review LA, The Capilano Review, ReIssue, BlackFlash, Cornelia Magazine, Public Parking, Peripheral Review, LUMA Quarterly, and in exhibition texts. Her artwork has been exhibited across Canada.   Lavery holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University’'’s School for the Contemporary Arts, and is currently based in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Nations.

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw (b. 1987, Edmonton, Treaty 6 Territory) lives and works in Berlin and Edmonton. Shaw completed his MFA at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2016), his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver (2013) and participated in the Berlin Program for Artists (2021). Selected solo and two person exhibitions include Wschód Warsaw (2025, 2021); Towards, Toronto (2024, 2017); Frieze Focus, London (2024); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2023); BPA// Raum, Berlin (2022); Liste, Basel (2021); and Ashley, Berlin (2018).

Selected group exhibitions include Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2025), Kunstverein Gastgarten, Hamburg (2025); Wschód, Warsaw (2023); Studio for Artistic Research, Düsseldorf (2022); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021); Union Pacific, London (2020); The Loon, Toronto (2019); and Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2018).

1. Nick Land, “Machinic desire,” Textual Practice, 7, no. 3 (1993): 476, https://xenopraxis.net/readings/land_machinicdesire.pdf.
2. Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, “City Limits,” artist talk at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany, January 24, 2023, 53 min., 23 sec., https://vimeo.com/877086074?share=copy.
3. Suncor Energy Inc., “Syncrude,” Suncor, https://www.suncor.com/en-ca/what-we-do/oil-sands/syncrude.

This article is published in issue 43.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue