DISTANT MEMORY

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

Our memory resides in a place of perceptive abstraction, while time is a subjective concept. How would our memory register when we mix the time apart with the physical distance apart? Distant Memory, the inaugural exhibition by Chinese-British artist Dori Deng, narrated her sentiment to her motherland as the first solo show in China. The exhibition also marked the starting point of the new Space of Time Gallery (launched in Spring 2024), where she co-designed the architectural space. 

Steel, glass, and tube lights are symbolic memories for Deng, who grew up in South China in the 1980s, the most prosperous period of the country. Her recognition of that time and place called home was labelled with progression, productivity, industrialisation, and urbanisation. The visual fragments retained in her memory are a brightly lit cityscape with industrial architectural landmarks, filled with movement of people, sound, and light; and the undertone beneath these visuals was the huge excitement of development and growth.

Expansion Series (2020 - present) is an ongoing series of light sculptures and installations by Deng, rooted in the research of Modernist Architecture from the 1940s and its extended social phenomenon of urbanisation. This research aligned perfectly with the time and place where this new exhibition would be presented. Deng used neon tube lights specifically for the artworks in this exhibition to symbolise and echo her subjective distant memory of the industrial prosperity of her childhood in South China. The materials in the sculptures come with raw edges or are kept in their original states as construction material, articulated with geometric balance and form harmony. Traditional Chinese roof tiles used on the gallery roof are also staged as part of the installation with neon tube light at the centre of the gallery room, symbolically questioning ourselves the value of craft tradition in the current time with technological and mass production. An antique slide projector from the 1950s is placed on a found stone from the gallery surrounding, simply throwing a sunset orange-coloured rectangle analogue projected light onto the gallery wall—a juxtaposition of nature and man-made through a sentimental gesture.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

— Four Quartets (1936) by T.S. Eliot