Founding Research Archive · Retrospective Edition I
Material, memory, labour
Exhibitions held in 2025Research & text: Aili XuPublished 18 August 2026
Three exhibitions in China and Hong Kong asked how material carries histories that institutions have overlooked: women’s labour, domestic knowledge and the uneven movement of a modern canon.
Method
Prepared from official exhibition archives and published retrospectively. These are critical research notes, not a claim of first-hand or contemporaneous review.
Women, technique and the symbolic life of clay
The Jealous Potter
The exhibition brought together eleven women artists working across sculpture, painting, installation, video and community practice. Its value lay in refusing to treat ceramics as either a minor craft or a timeless symbol of femininity. Instead, pottery appeared as technology: an accumulation of heat, labour, settlement and transmission.
At UCCA Clay—an institution located in Yixing, a city inseparable from ceramic production—the subject acquired a particular weight. Clay records pressure and touch, but it also records who has historically been permitted to name labour as art. The documented works opened that question beyond the vessel and into social memory.
Painting as an encounter with an incomplete archive
Chen Ke: Bauhaus Unknown
Chen Ke’s “Bauhaus Gal” series turns towards women of the Bauhaus whose lives were long compressed beneath the school’s familiar heroic history. More than sixty paintings and works on paper, together with a site-specific felt mural, did not simply supply missing biographies. They tested what painting can do when historical evidence arrives as photographs, fragments and belated recognition.
The project matters because recovery is never neutral. To paint an archival image is to introduce distance, affection and speculation. Chen’s surfaces resist the fantasy that overlooked lives can be restored whole. In a Chinese institutional context, European modernism could be encountered from elsewhere—not as an inherited centre, but as a history open to revision.
M+ placed more than sixty works by Picasso from the Musée national Picasso-Paris in dialogue with around 130 works from its own collection by more than thirty artists of Asian and Asian-diasporic heritage. The word “conversation” was structural rather than decorative: it changed the exhibition from a touring-masterpiece format into a test of how influence is narrated.
The risk in any Picasso exhibition is that other artists become supporting evidence for an already dominant name. The Hong Kong framing offered another possibility. Artists across generations could be read as interlocutors rather than recipients, and “Asia” as a field of distinct positions rather than a single response.