In other tour news… I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the fabulous Claudia Chan Shaw , who hosts tours for The Art Gallery Society of NSW in partnership with Renaissance Tours (no affiliation with Zenbu Travel, but I am happy to share), and has an incredible sounding Art Deco tour of Miami and New York coming up later this year!
I’ve never travelled with Claudia but having spent many hours chatting and emailing, I can assure you she is very knowledgeable, entertaining.. and more than a little bit oooh la lah!
If you’d like to find out a bit more about this energetic soul, well versed in architecture, design and the Arts then please read on….
MY LIFE IN TRAVEL – CLAUDIA CHAN SHAW
A collector of moments and markers, presenter Claudia Chan Shaw lives a life as colourful as the travel curiosities which fill her Sydney home.
We never took family trips as kids, so in 1979, when I accompanied mum (designer Vivian Chan Shaw) on a 30-day study trip around southern India, the culture-shock was tremendous. However, it didn’t take long to engage with the country’s beauty and the generous souls of the Indian people.
I was seventeen, my eyes were wide-open and the colours were incredible. In Madras I ran with the local children, ate peanuts from street vendors and visited antiques stores. In hill-towns further south, we rode donkeys so brittle I thought they’d break, and learnt about temples and religious symbolism. It was magnificent.
I knew nothing of Bollywood when we went to see Suhaag. It was so incredibly loud we had to put tissues in our ears, but I’d never seen dancing and singing like that. Obsessed with Humphrey Bogart from an early age, I’d already started collecting movie memorabilia so decided to track down a 12-sheet street poster of the movie, which I later stuck on my bedroom ceiling, cutting a hole for the light-fitting.
Not long afterwards I enrolled in a degree in visual communications, so film, design and photography became my whole new world. I’ve always found joy in the visual and at a young age knew I wanted to create. A couple of years later, mum and I went into partnership in our fashion business and travelled to the United States, mainly New York and Chicago, each season for more than 20 years. Once business was out of the way, we’d visit galleries and exhibitions and meet the most interesting, bohemian people who thought our hand-loomed knitwear was particularly ‘artsy’. We even sold to a gallery of wearable art in NYC.
One Chicago trip I met the head of the ArtDeco society who helped further my interests in the era, originally forged through watching black and white movies. I now host Art Deco-themed tours around the world for The Art Gallery Society of NSW, in partnership with RenaissanceTours; they’re almost time travelling experiences, tapping into the cultural heritage of each destination, including Shanghai, Miami, Cuba and of course NYC.
I love colour and humour and a 20-meter-high Roy Lichtenstein artwork on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue became my happy place; titled Mural with Blue Brushstroke, it contained imagery from many of his former paintings, virtually encapsulating his career. There’s a playful side of me that will never grow up and NYC became one of my centres for developing my collections, including Warner Bros animation cels, large-scale pop art influenced by Lichtenstein, and tiny things too. Once in Soho I found a shop called Think Big, full of oversized objects, and instantly fell for a five-foot-tall blue Crayola crayon which accompanied me on the next leg of my journey, my first trip to Paris…. Actually a miniature rubber Gumby travels everywhere with me and features in my photos.
Once, after I’d started collecting wind-up toys (along with tin toys and robots), I peered through the window of this amazing NYC store called The Last Wound-up where guys in business suits stood around a table in the middle of the store – happily playing with these fantastic toys and I thought ‘this is heaven’– so I bought a suitcase full!
I haven’t changed you know. I still have places I cannot resist, like the huge Paris flea-markets, Marché aux Puces de St-Ouen, as I know I’ll aways find something. Earlier, still very much in my Bogart stage, I’d read about a detective bookstore in San Francisco selling replicas of the Maltese Falcon and travelled specifically to acquire one – it’s not valuable, but it is one of my most treasured possessions. There was no internet back then to research or buy online so you grabbed things when you found them.
I collect Fashion too and it’s always during travel that you find ‘the’ great piece – you know, those timeless designs which remain in your wardrobe forever and you reminisce over, as I do with all my collections. Even if garments in a beautiful store are out of my reach, I’ll go in just to play – something I’d never do in my own city.
I’d love to see more of Australia. When I was presenting on Collectors (ABC TV) I spent a lot of time in Tasmania filming, but never saw anything of the place itself. Currently I’m working on the second series of my TV project called Antiques DownUnder, and that may help augment both my travels and collections!
Gosh, some people walk into our house and don’t know where to begin looking. We’re surrounded by art and photography, fossils and toys – not all over the floor of course, they’re ordered in glass cabinets – but every item tells a story.
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