ADAM SHIU-YANG SHAW

“Do you ever get homesick?” I ask the Berlin-based sculptor Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw. Adam thinks a lot about daily commutes: going from point A to point B. Every day, he tries to change his route, seeking small deviations, even if he arrives at the same destination. There’s a need for novelty, he tells me—something missing that we’re trying to fill. People attempt to fill this void with consumption because that’s an inherent part of the contemporary experience, and it’s a notion he contends with.

Currently based in Berlin, Adam’s work examines geographic relationships as if they were interpersonal ones. He’s drawn to Edmonton, where he’s from, Vancouver, where he spent formative years, and Berlin—cities that anchor his investigations into waste, infrastructure, and the narratives embedded in places. For Adam, relationships with places unfold over long periods of time, accumulating sentiment and meaning through lingering attention.

In his latest research, Adam traces typological categories of waste, from formal disposal and recycling sites to more informal treatments unique to the city. He describes it as a place stereotyped as unkempt in parts, and he leans into this, working both close and from afar. Sometimes his research emerges from excursions: taking photographs and field recordings, attending committee meetings, collecting waste materials. Other times, he works at a distance, using satellite images, archives, and encyclopedias to construct a fractured understanding of place.

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, Installation view, *Instrument Cluster* at Wschód Warsaw, 2025. Courtesy: © the artist and Wschód; Photo: Bartosz Zalewski.

His studio reflects this scavenging methodology. Stockpiles of wood detritus, stacks of egg cartons, photographic materials, most of which are found and repurposed. Wood, insulation foam, newsprint, MDF, particle board, repurposed furniture: malleable materials that timestamp the work, leaving what Adam calls “a certain imprint of the time and place in which an idea is made resolute.” He thinks of his practice as modeling, drawing from pre-existing forms and reconfiguring them, creating threads between disparate things rather than telling one-to-one stories.

Adam is particularly interested in municipal and living history museums, and their semi-fictional narratives: how places become historicized, reenacted, and who their inhabitants are imagined to be. These partial representations appeal to him; something in fragmentary form creates moments of transition where one thing shifts to another. His recent solo exhibition, Instrument Cluster at Galeria Wschód in Warsaw, brought these concerns home, examining the Athabasca oil sands of Canada through fragmentary maquettes built from found detritus. Sculptures were displayed both on the wall and very low to the ground, creating tensions of scale that made viewers conscious of how their bodies related to the work. There, extractive infrastructure became both cultural emblem and future ruin, a place remembered and misremembered in equal measure.

— Anh Dao Ha

ALEX SCHMIDT

Portrait of the artist. Photo documentation by Alec Shea (@shea.alec).

Every painting is the product of an invisible durational process between bodies and movements through space. In their Brooklyn studio, Alex Schmidt investigates this reality by painting still images from their figure drawing performance pieces, where they conjoin the roles of artist and model. In the hundreds of these performances they’ve done, Alex poses as different exaggerated characters, often nude or in absurd costumes. While holding still in these brief windows of time, Alex accesses a pause—a respite from the tumultuous life of an artist and a gig worker. They propose figure modeling as a moment of relief while still being both literally and metaphorically “on the clock.”

The suite of new paintings in Alex’s studio is interspersed with imagery of clocks within semi-lucid settings where doors open, windows recede, and figures fade in and out of perceptibility. The self-portraiture taking place is filtered through the characters that Alex performs, including one image from their performance Embodiment Session: V/VI at the Whitney in 2025, in which they wear a prosthetic pregnant belly. They often think about the way we are all “pregnant with change”: the self becoming host for its future iterations. Pregnancy is important to Alex in the way it engages the body as a temporal container or a surrogate. This is what happens in their performance: the drawers are transposed into their body, the body of the model, and the artist. In queer life, they explained, pregnancy can take so much planning and work ahead of time that it ultimately lasts more than nine months—its duration extends beyond the bodily.

Alex Schmidt, *Surveillance in the Playroom*, 2023. Oil on canvas after performance, 32 x 44 inches. Photo documentation taken by Logan White (@loganwhitephoto).

Painting is a fairly new practice for Alex, which arose in 2021 as a tool to complicate the body-time relation that exists in their performances and to question the recording of these works. No photograph or film can really do justice to the event that took place; it’s always mediated. Painting gives Alex control over the way these records are created: what is given attention, what is altered, and what is not. The clocks always appear in close proximity to the body in reference to the timed poses of a figure modeling session. Even though these moments are captured in the paint, Alex retains a sense of openness and breadth—a way into the figure and scene, and a way out. In that sense, these works imagine painting as performance practice in the expanded field.

Alex Schmidt is included in the upcoming exhibition Thieves Like Us at Benny’s Video, opening on October 26th at 28 Varick Ave, Brooklyn.

— Jonah James Romm

ESVIN ALARCÓN LAM

Personal histories populate the contemporary world. We have built our own unique strands of anthropological understanding, and such acts are foundational to decolonization. Esvin Alarcón Lam is an indispensable figure in the decolonial movement active in contemporary art today.

One of his most significant deliberations on heritage, inheritance, and identity is Ancestors Forest, commissioned by the Times Art Center Berlin in 2021. Available online, it is a thirteen-minute sound installation reflecting the passage of time from a small family business to the monopoly of monstrous factory settings. The artist talks about his name, “Lam,” meaning “forest” in Cantonese. The inheritance of a name came with the weight of a distant culture flowing into daily life. Was this part of his own multicultural upbringing, or the recognition of what was missing due to his distance from these roots? It is an extremely personal work that juxtaposes sounds from industrial textile machines with his family’s old sewing machine.

Transcultural dialogues are central to his practice today, evident across the many residencies and exhibitions in which he has participated. Textiles, installations, sculptures, performances—he shies away from nothing, as long as the conceptual parameters of his projects are fulfilled.

Esvin Alarcon Lam, *Cardamom Drawings (the line)*, 2021. Performance, Al-Batha, Saudi Arabia. Supported by Misk Art Institute. Photograph by Nada Alturki, courtesy of the artist.

One of the artist’s seminal works is the Cardamom Drawings that he did in Al Batha, Dubai. It stands as an example of how Alarcón Lam confronts the world with his practice as much as the world confronts him. It is not a conflict but a coming to terms with the incredible diversity that socio-political structures tend to deny as reality. Moving around, learning the land, growing with it, and then bringing in a world of his own that speaks to the desires, needs, and problems festering across wherever he finds himself.

His current work returns once again to find an understanding of his own heritage, as well as his position in the world today. Memoria del Viento (2025) is a sculptural installation made of bamboo. Its branches evoke both human lungs and the endurance of an Asian plant transported to the Americas via botanical expeditions. This imagery resonates with Guatemala’s Caribbean Chinese communities, whose businesses in Livingston were consumed by wind-fueled fires that obliterated much of their historical legacy. Alarcón Lam reframes wind as an agent of transformation rather than devastation—its influence over fire and water parallels the displacement and resettlement of these communities.

This position, no matter how one chooses to see it, permeates all those who may lay claim to origins not of the land they find themselves in. Godspeed, Alarcón Lam.

— Abbas Malakar

BENJAMIN LANGFORD

Benjamin Langford’s meditative landscapes invite us to divorce nature from its context. His multidisciplinary work, which combines photography, painting, and sculpture, creates a surrealist portrayal of the natural world that draws from urban spaces like botanical gardens, parks, and museum dioramas. His distortions of these terrains ask the viewer to question the purity of nature while still invoking the sublime.

Throughout his traveled adolescence, Langford used photography as a tool to experience places without falling into the cliches of tourism. Rather than depicting a scene, Langford is drawn to the power of an object. He’s fascinated with mundane settings, modeling contemporary images after romantic paintings.

In his solo exhibition, Scenes and Images at OCHI, Langford depicts idealized images of zoos and butterfly gardens. His photographs are printed on canvas and covered with several layers of gesso before he paints over them, subtly changing the composition and lighting of the original image. At first glance, the viewer might suspect they’re looking at an untouched natural landscape rather than a manufactured one.

Though trompe-l’œil inspires him, Langford sees his work as a process of uncovering rather than a trick. In his photography process, Langford searches for revelations of falsities. While scouting the Natural History Museum, he photographed the bits of plastic holding wire stems in place. Langford’s work complicates the idea that nature must remain untouched to be authentic. Scenes and Images delves into the connective tissue between nature and technology and how our aesthetic sensibilities connect the two.

Benjamin Langford, *Weeping Spruce*, 2024. Oil, acrylic, and pigment print on canvas, 55.5 x 42 in, 141 x 106.7 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and OCHI. Photo by Callum Stearns.

Langford is also known for his towering series of flowers, most recently displayed in his exhibition Fresh Cut. These hyperreal sculptures encompass meticulous embroidery, painting, and hundreds of photographs amalgamated into a single image. Although Langford’s flower and landscape series are often shown separately, he sees a connection between the two in their illusory quality.

While crafting the sculptures, Langford imagined himself as a pollinator—the “intended audience” for the flower. He’s drawn to the flower as an aesthetic subject: an object that is universally revered across species. The flower, however, isn’t immune to human touch. Langford is privy to the fact that flowers have been genetically modified for diversity, and they have been largely preserved for human consumption.

Langford’s work carries a melancholy tune–it captures the societal struggle to both tame and escape into the natural world. His art lands at the intersection of culture and earth, mechanical and natural. Still, though, in these surreal landscapes, Langford offers a contemplative experience that blends the romantic and mundane.

— Emi Grant

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