By Amelia Langas
Lyric Shen’s “Pages scent.” Courtesy the artist and Silke Lindner, New York. Photo by Chris Herity.
Have you ever looked out a window in the middle of a storm? Instead of allowing your gaze to focus on the drenched landscape, the foreground becomes clear. Rain spatters the surface in front of your eyes, flung wildly there like paint flicked from a brush. As the landscape drifts quietly into the background, new observations surface. You watch water droplets chase each other down the glass. One catches up to another and the two merge like a river’s arteries.
Memory convenes with space in that way. It lingers like your grandmother’s perfume after she hugs you and activates when you smell that same scent on a crowded subway car years after she passes. Lyric Shen explores this intersection of memory, body, and space in their new exhibition, “There is an occlusion” at Silke Lindner. Through reconstruction, archival photos, and a unique photo printing technique, the exhibition renders memory corporeal as it clings to constructed environments.
Anchoring the exhibition is a life-size construction of a room from the home where Shen’s mother lived in Yilan, Taiwan from 1961 to 1967. Built with scavenged wood, clay, and hand-processed mulberry and abaca paper, the room is not an exact replica, but an impression of the space stemming from Shen’s mother’s own oral history as well as drawings. How does this construction manifest memory? Like the room, memory is not a facsimile but rather an imprint of a moment in time.
Eleven images printed on porcelain and stone hang around the walls of the gallery and on the room structure’s walls. The images are from Shen’s own archive and depict ambient backgrounds: kitchens, flower shops, temples. Shen uses their water transfer technique to transmute the photos onto stone and porcelain pieces. As I spent time with each work blurring the line between print and sculpture, one piece in particular beckoned me: “Pages scent.”
“Pages scent” peeks into an intimate kitchen environment. A noren, or slitted fabric divider, partially obscures the upper half of the kitchen, but the countertop and floor remain visible. A melange of household items comfortably clutters the space: a toaster oven, a pan, dishes drying. No people are visible, but the ghost of human activity breathes in this kitchen. It’s rare to recognize one’s own memory in an artwork, but “Pages scent,” felt familiar. Though I haven’t been in that exact kitchen, I’ve lived through moments like the one shown here. It reminds me of the period of time after a fulfilling meal when dishes are cleared from the table and the initial clean-up is paused to mingle with loved ones by the glow of the kitchen light. The kitchen in “Pages scent” is not my own kitchen, but the ambience of the space evoked personal experience.
Shen’s water transfer technique for the photo works itself reflects the impression of memory upon space and creates a quality like looking through that rain-spattered window. Like Shen's images transferred onto porcelain and stone, so does memory transfer to spaces. This is what remembering feels like to me. It’s familiar, but also hazy, occasionally cracked, and sometimes new glimpses emerge.
Memory convenes with space in that way. It lingers like your grandmother’s perfume after she hugs you and activates when you smell that same scent on a crowded subway car years after she passes. Lyric Shen explores this intersection of memory, body, and space in their new exhibition, “There is an occlusion” at Silke Lindner. Through reconstruction, archival photos, and a unique photo printing technique, the exhibition renders memory corporeal as it clings to constructed environments.
Anchoring the exhibition is a life-size construction of a room from the home where Shen’s mother lived in Yilan, Taiwan from 1961 to 1967. Built with scavenged wood, clay, and hand-processed mulberry and abaca paper, the room is not an exact replica, but an impression of the space stemming from Shen’s mother’s own oral history as well as drawings. How does this construction manifest memory? Like the room, memory is not a facsimile but rather an imprint of a moment in time.
Eleven images printed on porcelain and stone hang around the walls of the gallery and on the room structure’s walls. The images are from Shen’s own archive and depict ambient backgrounds: kitchens, flower shops, temples. Shen uses their water transfer technique to transmute the photos onto stone and porcelain pieces. As I spent time with each work blurring the line between print and sculpture, one piece in particular beckoned me: “Pages scent.”
“Pages scent” peeks into an intimate kitchen environment. A noren, or slitted fabric divider, partially obscures the upper half of the kitchen, but the countertop and floor remain visible. A melange of household items comfortably clutters the space: a toaster oven, a pan, dishes drying. No people are visible, but the ghost of human activity breathes in this kitchen. It’s rare to recognize one’s own memory in an artwork, but “Pages scent,” felt familiar. Though I haven’t been in that exact kitchen, I’ve lived through moments like the one shown here. It reminds me of the period of time after a fulfilling meal when dishes are cleared from the table and the initial clean-up is paused to mingle with loved ones by the glow of the kitchen light. The kitchen in “Pages scent” is not my own kitchen, but the ambience of the space evoked personal experience.
Shen’s water transfer technique for the photo works itself reflects the impression of memory upon space and creates a quality like looking through that rain-spattered window. Like Shen's images transferred onto porcelain and stone, so does memory transfer to spaces. This is what remembering feels like to me. It’s familiar, but also hazy, occasionally cracked, and sometimes new glimpses emerge.