Curated by
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September 17, 2026
Image: Tina Lam, 2026. Photographed by Laurence Poirier.
Friday, May 12, 6-7 PM
NARS Project Space, 2nd Floor
As part of our Art in Dialogue series, NARS Foundation is pleased to present an artist talk featuring Tina Lam in Conversation with Xiao Liu, discussing her solo exhibition, …and the Cosmos returns to claim its place. The talk will be followed by a brief Q&A with the audience.
This program offers an opportunity to engage with the exhibition, on view through September 25. Visitors are welcome to arrive early to view the exhibition.
…and the Cosmos returns to claim its place is a large-scale installation exploring humanity’s relationship with the cosmos and the unknown. Hand-moulded black metallic foil sculptures, cast from tree roots and branches, converse with handmade translucent paper, yielding a suspended realm of shadow and light. Evoking a celestial theatre, the work invites viewers to wander beneath an atmospheric canopy where darkness and luminosity converge, prompting reflection on otherness, transformation, and regeneration.
About the artist:
Tina Lam was born in Montréal/Tio'tia:ke/Mooniyang, and raised by Cambodian-Chinese refugees. She creates large-scale sculptures and installations born out of land-art interventions to muse about humanity’s mystical entanglement with the beyond-human. She graduated from Cornell University (MFA Studio Arts), Concordia University (BFA Studio Arts) and McGill University (PhD Chemistry). She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Council for the Arts, and was a finalist for the 2024 Polygon Prize recognizing practices that delve into unexplored avenues of research that have the potential to fuel debate and change both aesthetic and social benchmarks. She has attended many residencies, namely at Shandaken: Storm King, NARS Foundation, Sagamie, and the Carving Studio & Sculpture Center. Her work has been exhibited at Ortega Y Gasset and NARS Foundation (Brooklyn), Jack Hanley Gallery (Manhattan), Le Livart and articule (Montreal), Upstairs Gallery (Toronto), L’Écart (Rouyn-Noranda) and Sagamie (Alma). In 2025, Lam was a finalist for the CIBC C² Art Program (Toronto) and was a participant in the ARTCH Program championing emerging artists in Montreal. In 2026, Lam was nominated for the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Visual Artists.
About the moderator:
Xiao Liu is a New York–based curator, writer, and artist working across curatorial practice, art history, East Asian studies, and critical theory. He approaches exhibition-making as a form of inquiry. Central to his methodology is interdisciplinarity, understood as a way of restoring knowledge’s horizontal dimension—displacing the metaphor of depth rather than simply supplementing it. Within this framework, exhibitions seek to function as sites where artistic practice, histories of ideas, and forms of relation encounter one another, while artmaking itself is treated as a mode of knowledge production. Trained in fine art studio practice and interdisciplinary humanities, Liu helped found and currently serves as curator of TaThaTa, a gallery space in Lower Manhattan.
