Our
Exhibition
Fang Ting Ting: From Here, What Remains
Dates: 29 Oct - 1 Nov 2026
Venue: 2104 Dundas St W, Toronto, Canada
Artist: Fang Ting Ting
Exhibition Assistant: Jiachen Liu
ArtWork Photos: Darren Rigo
Onsite Photos: Huayi Media, Canada & World Report, International Art News, Asian Academy of Arts
Organiser: Asian Academy of Arts, International Federation of Arts & Artists, International Art News
Fang Ting Ting’s Solo Exhibition From Here, What Remains Opens in Toronto
Fang Ting Ting’s solo exhibition From Here, What Remains opened in Toronto, Canada, on 30 October 2026. The exhibition presented metal mesh works, a mirror installation, a photographic and text installation, video and participatory work created in 2026. Through family, childhood surroundings and personal experiences, it explored how people and things that are no longer present continue to live on in the body, everyday habits and our understanding of ourselves. More than 30 local artists, cultural representatives, media professionals and visitors attended the opening and joined conversations about the works and their making.
Exhibition poster for From Here, What Remains
Exhibition opening
Canadian artist Michael Janzen, chairman of the International Federation of Arts & Artists, gave the opening address. Drawing on four visits to China to participate in art exhibitions, he spoke about cultural exchange between East and West in contemporary art. Ma Lixia, president of the Canadian Association of Chinese Journalists and Editors and executive editor of International Arts News, and Zhao Pincheng, general manager of Canada & World Report, also spoke, welcoming Fang’s exhibition in Toronto and congratulating her on its opening. Fang thanked the guests for their support and invited their comments and suggestions.
Guests included Yu Congzhang, chairman of the board of the Atlantic Cultural and Arts Exchange Association; Timur Zhao, president of the Confederation of Chinese Alumni’s Association; Zhang Xujing, vice chairman of the World Foundation of Chinese Mass Media, and Deng Lanyue, a director of the foundation; Shifu, a Chinese Canadian artist working in Iconographic Art; and Ding Xue, a candidate for Toronto City Council in Ward 10, Spadina–Fort York, in the 2026 municipal election. Canadian artists and arts enthusiasts also attended.
The exhibition began with a question that had troubled Fang for years: what does making art mean when the works cannot be preserved? She had lost almost all her work in three separate incidents. A house used to store her paintings collapsed after prolonged heavy rain; a sewage pipe burst in another residence; and a typhoon later struck a storage building. Paintings and early studies from different periods were destroyed, some before they had been photographed. Each time she received such news, it felt as though a part of the life she had spent with those works had been erased from the world.
Her grandfather’s death brought another encounter with loss. His absence also seemed to carry away an era they had shared. Yet experiences that had never been deliberately recorded began to return through everyday movements. As a child, Fang often sat beside her grandmother, watching her sew clothes and stitch quilt covers to their filling to keep them in place. She gradually learned these movements by watching. Years later, when she used metal wire to stitch mesh, the familiar gestures returned through a different material. She recognised that experiences passed on without deliberate instruction had become part of her body and of herself.
Life - Birth, Childhood, Youth, Post-Youth, Death, 2026. Stainless steel mesh, coloured metal mesh, stainless steel wire, steel wire, aluminium wire, aluminium crimp sleeves and matt white spray paint, 100 x 150 cm each. Photo: Darren Rigo
Metal mesh appeared throughout the exhibition. Its origins lie in the ordinary window screens of Fang’s childhood home. Through their fine grids, she watched the streets, surroundings and people outside. The mesh offered protection while also creating a barrier. This experience of looking through a grid gradually became a way for her to give form to social rules and human relationships. Metal feels cold and rigid, yet it can be cut, pulled, folded and stitched. Its form can change while retaining the marks of the forces applied to it.
Installation view, Toronto, 2026. Photo: Darren Rigo
The Life series uses the same material to condense a lifetime into five states: Birth, Childhood, Youth, Post-Youth and Death. Each work measures 100 × 150 cm and shares the same basic mesh construction and methods of joining. Within this common structure, each undergoes a different transformation: an opening within an ordered surface, tears left by growing up, the entanglements of emotional relationships, the rejoining of broken parts, and an ash-like form that appears to disperse.
Life series (detail), 2026. Photo: Darren Rigo
In Youth, a whole sheet of white metal mesh is pulled and wound into a complex knot over a red mesh surface marked by vein-like creases. Post-Youth uses cutting, rejoining and fastening to make separate sections appear to form a continuous surface, while leaving seams and misalignments visible. From a distance, decades of life are reduced to a few states. Up close, torn edges, tension within the knots and materials concealed beneath the layers reveal experiences that resist such simple categories.
Life series (detail), 2026. Photo: Darren Rigo
The mirror installation Within turns the viewer’s attention towards themselves. It combines 194 small mirrors and flexible mirror film within a wooden frame. A regular arrangement of mirrors forms a central grid, while bent reflective surfaces around its edges produce views from different angles. Viewers can still recognise themselves, but the image is made up of many parts and stretches, shifts or distorts as they move. Every mirror contributes to the reflection, yet no single piece can represent the whole person.
Within, 2026. Mirror installation, wooden frame, matt white spray paint, acrylic mirrors, silver acrylic mirrors and flexible PET mirror film, 40.2 × 40.2 × 5 cm. Photo: Darren Rigo
The work considers how people come to understand themselves. Social judgements, family expectations, memory and imagination all contribute to this understanding, which is continually added to, revised and reassembled. During installation, Fang also noticed light reflecting from the mirrors onto the floor. These reflections extended the work beyond the wall, creating an effect she had not anticipated.
Within, 2026. Mirror installation, wooden frame, matt white spray paint, acrylic mirrors, silver acrylic mirrors and flexible PET mirror film, 40.2 × 40.2 × 5 cm. Photo: Darren Rigo
Family relationships take different forms in Still the Same Net and Among Five. The former consists of five green metal mesh panels of varying sizes and thicknesses. They overlap and hang from black chains beneath a horizontal bar assembled from five metal sections. Mesh, chains and bar all form part of the work, suggesting the connections, support and constraints within a family. Among Five uses aluminium wire to outline five figures representing two grandparents, two parents and a child. Placed in different parts of the space, the figures have open interiors and distinct postures and heights. Visitors may discover them gradually as they walk through the exhibition, much as familiar family members can become so much a part of daily life that their presence is no longer consciously noticed.
Still the Same Net, 2026. Hanging installation, green metal mesh, stainless steel rods and connectors, metal chains, metal wire, matt black spray paint, approx. 300 × 140 cm. Photo: Darren Rigo
Among Five (detail), 2026. Spatial installation, 4 mm diameter aluminium wire, Dimensions variable. Photo: Darren Rigo
The video What If It’s Just This? brings together five recordings of Fang cutting metal mesh on different days. Arranged as five horizontal strips, the recordings end at different times. Images and their original sounds disappear one by one, leaving empty spaces beside actions that continue. The 52-second work plays on a loop on a vintage radio-style digital media player, recalling her grandfather’s habit of tuning the radio during her childhood. Growing out of memories of her grandparents’ daily lives, the work asks: if a person’s life produces no achievement that society considers worth recording, how should we understand the moments they lived and the effects they had on others?
What If It’s Just This?, 2026. Single-channel digital video (colour, sound), vintage radio-style digital media player, 52 seconds, looped. Photo: Darren Rigo
Displayed in the front window, Withdrawing Expectations combines a photograph taken by Fang with her complete exhibition statement in a photographic and text installation measuring one metre wide by three metres long when unfolded. In the photograph, metal mesh obscures part of her face. The lower section of the printed fabric poster is folded irregularly, leaving only the beginning of the statement available to read. A carefully completed act of expression is then deliberately concealed. The work returns to a sentence Fang wrote in 2019: “To live in hope is not truly to live.”
Withdrawing Expectations, 2026. Photographic and text installation, printed fabric and aluminium-alloy hanging rods, 100 x 300 cm (unfolded dimensions). Photo: Darren Rigo
Questions of disappearance, continuity and vitality have also appeared in Fang’s earlier practice. In 2016, she painted the same bouquet as it gradually withered, responding to its changing condition through thick, forceful brushwork. Her 2021 participatory land art project The Eye of Life arranged publicly donated mangrove saplings in the shape of an eye, connecting individual actions with a natural environment that continues to grow and change. The Toronto exhibition returned these concerns to family experience and bodily memory, exploring them through new materials and spatial relationships.
Fang also brought her curatorial approach to the presentation of her own work. Individual labels and wall texts were omitted, with information collected in an exhibition handbook instead. Visitors could first encounter the works directly, then read the handbook and return to look again.
This arrangement helped shape the conversations at the opening. Some visitors returned to examine materials, structures and details after reading the handbook, then asked Fang questions. Discussions began with what they had seen and moved towards the ideas and processes behind the works.
Within received positive responses from several visitors, who were particularly interested in its initial idea and Fang’s decision to combine different mirrors to reflect a person. She explained the relationship between the regular central mirrors and the distorted reflections around them. Conversations about the metal mesh works moved from layering, stitching and cutting to bodily experience, including the connections between these actions and childhood memories. Visitors also shared associations with their own lives.
The participatory work Leave Your Mark continued to change throughout the exhibition. Visitors added signatures, words, drawings and lines to the canvas, eventually filling it with their images and handwriting. An invitation to leave an individual mark gradually developed into a shared work through successive contributions.
Fang works as both an artist and a curator. Her practice spans painting, installation, photography, moving image, poetry and spatial work. She initiated A Manifesto, an international exhibition series supporting emerging artists and artists who have had limited opportunities to present their work. Over the past five years, she has organised exhibitions, forums and other art projects in Paris, Venice, London, Riyadh and Hong Kong. In this solo exhibition, her longstanding interest in the relationships between artworks, space and viewing returned to her own practice. Works drawn from personal experience became the basis for further conversations through direct encounters, audience participation and exchanges with fellow arts professionals.
News of Fang’s Toronto solo exhibition and related activities, including the Art Toronto preview and visits to museums and galleries, was published or republished by 129 media outlets and platforms across Canada and the United States. These included mainstream newspapers such as the Toronto Sun and Vancouver Sun, alongside titles with more than a century of history, including The London Free Press and Ottawa Citizen. Local arts information platforms and news and tourism channels in Toronto also shared exhibition information, extending the reach of the exhibition and related arts exchanges.