Fang Ting Ting to Explore Memory and Family in Toronto Solo Exhibition

TORONTO, Oct. 21, 2026 —Canada & World Report —Artist and curator Fang Ting Ting will present From Here, What Remains, a solo exhibition exploring how family, personal loss and childhood experiences continue to shape identity.

Organized by the Asian Academy of Arts, the exhibition brings together hand-stitched metal mesh, mirrors, photography, moving image and participatory installations. Its works examine how people and experiences that have disappeared from daily life can remain present in gestures, habits and ways of seeing.

The exhibition draws on questions Fang confronted after substantial bodies of her artwork were destroyed in accidents on three separate occasions. In her exhibition statement, she describes feeling that periods of her life had disappeared along with the physical objects.

“If the works could not remain, what did making them mean?” she writes.

Her grandfather’s death brought those questions into sharper focus. Over time, she began to recognize that the influence of people who have died can continue through everyday actions, including the stitching techniques her grandmother taught her as a child.

Metal mesh, a recurring material throughout the exhibition, recalls the window screens through which Fang watched the world outside her childhood home. In her account, their regular grids suggest both protection and restriction, connecting memories of domestic life with the expectations and rules that shape a person’s place in a family and society.

Fang cuts, stretches, folds and stitches the mesh with metal wire. The process draws on her grandmother’s lessons in needlework and quilt sewing, carrying a learned childhood gesture into her current practice.

The five-part Life series condenses a person’s life into Birth, Childhood, Youth, Post-Youth and Death. Each work measures 100 by 150 centimeters and uses layers of mesh transformed through openings, knots, seams and other interventions. While the series presents a shared progression through life, its torn edges, concealed layers and marks of repair draw attention to experiences that cannot be fully conveyed by those five stages.

In Within, Fang assembles 194 small mirrors and flexible reflective film inside a wooden frame. A central grid produces a recognizable image, while bent and folded surfaces around it distort and shift the reflection as viewers move. The work considers how a sense of self is assembled through social judgments, family expectations, memory and personal imagination.

Family relationships take physical form in Still the Same Net, a hanging installation composed of five green mesh panels of different sizes and thicknesses. Suspended from a bar made of five joined metal sections, the panels overlap while retaining their individual shapes. Black chains express what Fang describes as the connections and constraints within family life.

Among Five returns to memories of a household comprising two grandparents, two parents and a child. Five human outlines made from aluminum wire will be placed throughout the exhibition space at different heights and in everyday poses. Rather than being prominently displayed, the figures are intended to be discovered gradually as visitors move through the room.

The 52-second video What If It’s Just This? combines five recordings of Fang cutting metal mesh on different days. Arranged in horizontal strips, the recordings end at different times, with their images and original sounds disappearing one by one. Presented on a vintage radio-style digital media player, the work recalls her grandfather’s habit of tuning the radio.

Withdrawing Expectations combines a photograph of Fang’s face partly obscured by mesh with the exhibition statement, printed on a large fabric poster. Its folded lower section conceals part of the text, turning a means of communicating information into a work about expression and concealment.

Visitors will also be invited to contribute to Leave Your Mark, an ongoing participatory installation made with cotton canvas and fabric paint markers. A signature, word, drawing or simple line will become part of the artwork alongside marks left by others.

Fang began studying painting in childhood and later studied art in China, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Her practice spans painting, installation, photography, moving image, poetry and spatial work.

As a curator, she initiated A Manifesto, an international exhibition series supporting emerging and underrepresented artists. Her recent projects include A Manifesto II at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris in 2025; Art and Making: Material Culture, Craft and Emerging Practices, organized by the Asian Academy of Arts at the British Museum’s BP Lecture Theatre and East Foyer in London on March 4, 2026; and Voices, Amplified: A Manifesto in Venice in August 2026. She has also been appointed director of the IFAA Center for Curatorial Affairs at the International Federation of Arts & Artists.

The opening reception for From Here, What Remains will take place Friday, Oct. 30, 2026, from 6 to 9 p.m.

The exhibition will run from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, 2026, at 2104 Dundas St. W. in Toronto. On Saturday, Oct. 31, and Sunday, Nov. 1, opening hours will be from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 2 to 6 p.m. Admission is free, and no booking is required.

Further information is available on the exhibition website.