Tom Hsu

Around the Corner

June 24 - August 22, 2021

Libby Leshgold Gallery

Hours: 12-5 pm Tuesday-Sunday

This summer, the Libby Leshgold Gallery is pleased to present Around the Corner, a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Tom Hsu. Through his decade-long, diaristic photographic practice that chronicles queer life, Hsu registers the inseparability between the banal tenderness of gesture and the record-keeping work of intimacy.

Around the Corner spans a wide range of subjects, drawing from Hsu’s many ongoing photographic series. Portraits of friends, family, and strangers intermingle with the sweating bodies of drag balls, unintended still life, and domestic interiors. These images sprawl up, down, and around the gallery’s walls in indeterminate groupings, skipping back and forth through time: occasions both celebratory and quiet, floral motifs, and a salt-encrusted towel set over a fence are placed alongside overlapping limbs lounging at golden hour, abstract depictions of snow, and Hsu’s ah ma gazing pensively beyond the frame. These proximate scenes expand and contract into moments of longing, solitude, and kinship. The familiar becomes familial.

Hsu’s subjects are on the verge of transformation. The formality of the photographic form is breached through his elusive and textured approach to the moments he depicts; each image exceeds its very representation. Encounters and exchanges echo histories of relations while gestures are hinted and repeated, becoming emblems of Hsu’s methodology. The photographs, alongside Hsu’s choreographic sculptures, seek to investigate the multilayered conditions of public and private space as well as the bodies that populate them. Places, spaces, and individuals are drawn together by a desire for affective communities and a commitment to alternative socialities and intimacies. The bounds of subjectivity slip and shift in these photographs, and viewers are invited to see a world in a state of ongoing re-orientation.

Tom Hsu is an artist currently living and working in Vancouver. His recent exhibitions and projects have been hosted by Burrard Arts Foundation, Macaulay Fine Art, Centre A, and Richmond Art Gallery. He holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Hsu will engage in a series of public programs and activities in the gallery’s media space.

Around the Corner is the first in a series of exhibitions at the Libby Leshgold Gallery organized by guest curators Phanuel Antwi, Jenn Jackson, and Christian Vistan.

Please see Emily Carr University’s COVID-19 Safety Plan prior to planning your visit. Online bookings are encouraged. For more information, visit Libby Leshgold Gallery.