Sami Tsang (b. 1997, Windsor, Ontario, Canada) is a Toronto-based ceramic and mixed-media artist. Tsang spent part of her childhood in Hong Kong, where she studied traditional Chinese painting for seven years. This early training formed a lasting foundation for her visual sensibility and introduced a sustained engagement with image-making, brushwork, and material translation. Moving between Hong Kong and Canada throughout her upbringing shaped her early artistic development and informed her decision to pursue visual art as a practice grounded in material thinking.
She earned a Bachelor of Craft and Design in Ceramics from Sheridan College in 2019 and an MFA in Ceramic Art from Alfred University in 2021. During her graduate studies, she developed a focus on sculptural ceramics and figurative construction, working across clay and mixed media approaches. Following her MFA, Tsang was an Artist-in-Residence in Ceramics at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto from 2021 to 2025, where she maintained an active studio practice supported by public programming, exhibitions, and community engagement. In 2024, she participated in the 7th International Artist Retreat and Residency in Anhui, China.
Tsang’s work has been exhibited in solo and group presentations across Canada, the United States, and China. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include Cooper Cole Gallery (Toronto), Claire Oliver Gallery (New York), AYE Gallery (Beijing), the Gardiner Museum, the Art Gallery of Burlington, and Harbourfront Centre. Her work has also been presented in institutional and curated exhibitions at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Sculpture Space NYC, and the Gardiner Museum, as well as in art fairs including Art Toronto, Plural (Montreal), NADA Miami, and EXPO Chicago.
She is the recipient of the 25th Annual Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics, along with multiple Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts grants supporting her studio and exhibition practice. Her work is held in the collections of the Gardiner Museum, the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, the Canadian Clay & Glass Collection, the North Dakota Museum of Art, Collection Majudia, and numerous private collections. Tsang currently works from her independent studio in Toronto.
Visit Sami Tsang’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2022-2026
My work explores cultural inheritance, migration, memory, and selfhood through ceramic sculpture and mixed media. Drawing from my family’s history of displacement and my experience growing up between Chinese and Western cultures, I create hybrid figures that navigate resilience, transformation, and the complexities of inherited experience.
Many of my works begin with family stories, childhood memories, and Chinese proverbs that shaped my understanding of the world. These references become a framework for examining intergenerational relationships, cultural expectations, and the ways survival is carried across generations. I am particularly interested in how adaptation, sacrifice, and resilience become embedded within family narratives and continue to influence how we see ourselves and one another.
Working primarily with clay, I approach making as an intuitive and reflective process. Forms emerge through gradual additions, revisions, and negotiations with the material. Ceramics allows me to translate intangible experiences into physical form, giving shape to emotions, memories, and conversations that are often difficult to articulate.
My sculptures often occupy a space between vulnerability and strength, humour and discomfort, tradition and transformation. Through hybrid characters and symbolic forms, I explore the tensions between individual agency and inherited expectations, examining how personal voice emerges from within larger cultural and familial structures.
Recently, recurring motifs such as hybrid animals and symbolic creatures have emerged in my practice as a way of exploring memory, endurance, adaptation, and intergenerational resilience. Ultimately, my work is an ongoing attempt to understand what is carried forward and what can be transformed. By giving form to memory, resilience, and lived experience, I create sculptures that hold the tensions between survival and selfhood, tradition and change.
