RECLAIM

Space of Time Gallery is proud to present Reclaim, a duo-exhibition brings together gallery represented artist Lucinda Burgess (UK) and the celebrated Chinese artist Ni Zhiqi 倪志琪, the show stages a sleek dialogue between two artists of the same generation, shaped by different cultural influences, but who arrive at strikingly parallel contemporary artistic expressions of materiality and sensibility.

Both Burgess and Ni work with what is at hand—waste paper, worn fabric, salvaged surfaces, mundane materials without inherent value. Neither begins from a blueprint; each allows meaning to accumulate slowly, through repetition, labour, and duration. In this sense, Reclaim is not simply about recycling material matter, but about recycling perception itself—taking what is habitually unseen and, through sustained conceptual process, reactivates it as something worthy of contemplation. 

"Everything we do is music." — John Cage, such as the 20th century pioneer American composer’s infamous theory that any sound might be music, Burgess and Ni’s art practices echo it: any surface, any fragment of the everyday, might likewise be reclaimed as a gesture of art, once looked at differently, and understood differently. Between Burgess’s sculptural and installation drawings and Ni’s painterly abstraction, the exhibition proposes that contemporary meaning is not found, but made, by viewing materiality from different perspectives, by hand, through time.

Lucinda Burgess’s art practice is clearly affected by over a decade spent at a Buddhist monastery, an experience that continues to shape her understanding of drawing as meditative and devotional labour. In "Salvage 1" and "Salvage 2" (2026), she covers worn, discarded paper materials, attending to every millimetre, nook and cranny with her pencil. The graphite catches the light so that every movement by the viewer alters the visual field. Also on view in the exhibition "You Are Here" (2025), a set of three found British survey maps entirely hand-covered in pencil—familiar cartographic tools rendered abstract, their original function obscured beneath a dense, reflective skin of graphite, an act of reclamation and underlining the viewer’s physical presence in the gallery — ‘You are Here’, not there! The latest installation "Colour Chart" series extends the investigation of colour and form from Burgess’ debut solo exhibition at the gallery from 2025: strips of paper projecting from the wall shift hue subtly as the viewer moves. Each unit in the installation is comprised of 6 slender sheets of hand-drawn Aquarelle Arches paper, the texture of which is slate-like and thin but solid, together they form an extremely changeable and intricate experience of material manipulation. The artwork insists that colour, like place, is never fixed but always contingent on our subjective perspective.

Ni Zhiqi’s early inspiration from the legendary German artist Joseph Beuys during his early art education in Antwerp in the early 1990s left a lasting imprint on his artistic language, shaping his enduring interest in material transformation in painting. The progress era of contemporary art in Europe was far different from China at the time, the idea that anything can be used for art making, anyone can be an artist opened a new gateway to Ni’s early development as an young Chinese abstract painter. The artist is still collecting large amounts of recycled sheet materials in his studio to date, repurposing and rethinking are the daily routines in Ni’s studio practice. This exhibition presents a focused body of work from his latest "Vacuum" series, an ongoing series of monochrome paintings that employ the colour fields in the most pure and extreme way. These paintings built through recycled fabric, mixed media, and layered application, their hazy, monochromatic surfaces the result of lengthy, accumulative process. Each painting suggests an unique subjective motion, it is personal to the artist as well as personal to each viewer—an artwork to be interpreted and reclaimed differently by different people. In contrast, unique early work by the artist is showing in the exhibition as an important references: "Voyage" (2011) appears as a kind of deconstructed reverse form of the Vacuum pieces, its form loosened and dispersed from the stretched canvas frame.

Burgess and Ni reveal how differently—and how similarly—materiality, patience and process can be reclaimed. Where her pencil recasts the surface of a map, his brush blend the edges of memory and place through monotone expression. "Reclaim" invites viewers into the minimalistic contemporary art space where the discarded becomes deliberate, the mundane becomes meditative, and the everyday, given time, becomes art.