Pearl Lam Galleries Hong Kong present a group show inspired by Marcel Proust‘s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time.

The exhibition features works by six leading contemporary artists: Chun Kwang Young, Leonardo Drew, Dale Frank, Hew Locke, Qiu Deshu, and Yinka Shonib. Curator Paul Moorhouse takes from In Search of Lost Time the Proustian theme that the physical world, its inhabitants, and all experience are fugitive: everything that exists comes into being, endures and then disappears from the flux of reality. Structures of Recollection focuses on the notion that the material fabric of the world and the objects within it act as triggers for memory. All the pieces on show have this evocative power, providing a discourse about the way in which different artists from the East and West deal with structures of recollection within their works. Each artist engages with the associative and expressive qualities of their chosen media.

Part painter and part alchemist, Dale Frank’s paintings see paint dripped onto surfaces made from a variety of different materials. Steeped in the tradition of Chinese painting, Qiu Deshu uses Xuan paper in his collage- based work. Both Leonardo Drew and Chun Kwang Young assert the physical characteristics of their materials, emphasising their texture, colour, and shape, thereby creating something that is insistently sculptural and tactile. The work of Yinka Shonibare MBE and Hew Locke demonstrate a shared sensitivity to the evocative power of manufactured materials and objects. The artists’ private memories, embedded within the works, trigger the viewers’ own imagination causing an interesting intersection of different feelings and stories that give to the to the visual media a new-found meaning.