Smokestack Commission Program
Sami Tsang
Ongoing Exhibition
Oct 24 2026 – Mar 21 2027
Sami Tsang, detail of What We Carry Forward, 2026. Ink, porcelain, and silver. Commissioned by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
- CURATORS
Adelina Vlas, Artistic Director Sarah Edo, TD Curatorial Fellow
What We Carry Forward by Toronto-based artist Sami Tsang is the inaugural work in The Power Plant’s Smokestack Commission Program. Tsang is a Chinese-Canadian artist working primarily as a ceramicist. Her work stems from her own narratives as well as the stories she gathers around domestic encounters. Working primarily with ceramics, painting, and metal, Tsang channels these stories into her artmaking to reveal shared, raw, emotional experiences.
Drawing from her studio practice, which brings together themes of migration, inheritance, and memory through figurative sculpture and mixed media, Tsang creates a site-specific, large-scale ink mural. Inspired by childhood shadow puppetry and populated by tiny porcelain figurines of girls, the work explores the space between vulnerability and protection, play and strength, memory and becoming. Through the imagined world of fantasy, care, and collective movement, Tsang considers the quieter inheritances women carry through their lives and pass between generations. In this symbolic realm, the materials become part of the story itself: the clay holds the body; the silver protects the spirit.
About the Artist
Sami Tsang
Sami Tsang is a Chinese-Canadian artist working primarily as a ceramicist. Her sculptures stem from her own narratives as well as the stories she gathers around domestic encounters. Using clay, resin, rice paper and ball point pen, Tsang channels these stories into her art-making to reveal shared, raw, emotional experiences.
