“Spiral Diaries” marks Leelee Chan’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Klemm’s, presenting a brand new physique of sculptures that proceed her exploration of materiality, temporality, and transformation. Chan fuses materials and objects into dynamic constellations that span geological, cultural, and industrial timeframes, forging a apply during which historical relics, modern manufacturing processes, and pure phenomena converge into autonomous sculptural entities. Her sculptures operate each as self-contained kinds and as a part of a steady stream of thought, articulating a fabric intelligence that weaves by way of her expertise and early work, evolving into her present and future apply.
All through Spiral Diaries, the spiral emerges as a visible, conceptual, and symbolic leitmotif. Evoking development, recursion, and the nonlinearity of time, spirals reference the cochlea, whelk egg instances, and mollusk shells, in addition to the invisible constructions underlying motion and communication—patterning that, like a diary, encodes survival methods throughout generations. This manner alerts a broader metaphor in Chan’s work: materials and conceptual transformation by way of layered accumulation fairly than fastened endpoints.
In Shapeshifter (Mitridae) (2025), a hand-carved onyx shell encases a 3D-printed stainless-steel spiral construction—a configuration that evokes the so-called “unattainable object,” a multipart kind the place an inside construction exists freely inside an outer shell with none bodily connection between them. Whereas 3D printing made the fabrication of such objects attainable within the Eighties, traditionally, ‘unattainable objects’ had already been realized within the intricate hand-carved ivory Chinese language puzzle balls centuries in the past. In Chan’s sculpture, the hollowed stone envelops a fragile metallic spiral, harking back to the predatory sea snails of the Mitridae household. The spiral, a type of development and motion, additionally evokes industrial instruments and their harmful energy. By embedding an industrial core into hand-shaped stone, Chan destabilizes concepts of purity, custom, and craftsmanship, suggesting a continuum between geological time and rising applied sciences. Shapeshifter (Mitridae) embodies the anomaly on the coronary heart of her apply: works that exist between the pure and synthetic, inhabiting the fluid house the place the 2 converge.
Throughout the house, Chan repositions discovered and industrially manufactured supplies—faraway from the cycles of consumption and obsolescence—to recast them as protagonists. Peculiar Pyramid (2024) brings collectively fragments of a Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) burial horse and an earth spirit determine inside a vertically stratified construction composed of discovered prefabricated aluminium parts and hand-worked epoxy clay. Resting on a mirrored base, the sculpture challenges notions of monumentality and permanence, juxtaposing industrial precision with the subtleties of human craftsmanship. This distinction exposes the friction between labor programs and the obscured origins of products, whereas celebrating imperfection and materials expressiveness. Her sculptures live formations, animated by their histories, activating fracture and absence as sculptural forces. The mirrored base destabilizes perspective, inviting dynamic interplay with the work. Slightly than idealizing the previous or fetishizing technological novelty, Chan permits every materials’s historical past and future potential to stay open—proposing sculptures as paradigms of considering processes, not solutions.
One other dialogue between materials vitality and spatial notion unfolds in Wooden Extensive Internet (2025), the place a solid of manipulated, discovered plastic delivery pallet fragments evokes subterranean mycorrhizal networks—hidden programs by way of which timber talk and maintain each other. The usage of pallets, a recurring motif in Chan’s work since 2018 (additionally seen in Moth, 2023), attracts a parallel between the underground community of tree roots and the above-ground system of pallets, which operate as short-term, cell surfaces throughout the context of a round, international financial system. The delicate, root-like kinds render seen what sometimes stays unseen, whereas the chemical strategy of lost-wax casting course of introduces a component of fabric autonomy. The distinction between human concepts of development—targeted on effectivity, labor removing, and human-centric development—and the intelligence of different life kinds, which develop by way of communication and the sharing of assets, is hanging. The patina, harking back to historical Chinese language ritual bronzes buried for the afterlife and now unearthed, provides a layer of historic depth. Hovering at an elevated top, Wooden Extensive Internet blurs the distinctions between structure and natural development, additional activating the encircling house and lengthening the viewer’s notion between inside and exterior realms.
In Moth (2023), Chan reconfigures discovered delivery pallets and petrified wooden into fragile, wing-like constructions, subtly evoking the Chinese language perception that moths are spirits of deceased family members visiting. The work compresses layered temporalities—human time, embodied within the sculpting of plastic and clay; deep time, mirrored within the petrified wooden; and the ephemeral life cycle of the moth—blurring boundaries between artificial particles and natural reminiscence.
Materials sensibilities proceed in Maker’s Egg Circumstances (2025). Dense clusters of zinc-plated hex nuts, tinted tempered glass, and enlarged plastic egg case casted in tub stone powder, recommend each industrial meeting and marine environments. The surfaces of the nuts, topped with blue glass discs, catch the altering daylight, refracting it like ocean membranes and shimmering with the iridescence of shells or the gleaming, poisonous sheen of spilled gasoline. Chan fuses industrial repetition with natural metamorphosis, highlighting humanity’s drive to create protecting, environment friendly designs—instances that allow mobility and stackability, mirroring the round financial system. Whereas people form environments to serve their wants, mollusks and different sea creatures should regularly adapt to guard themselves from their altering realities.
In a actuality formed by reductive narratives and binary considering, Spiral Diaries provides a vocabulary for inhabiting complexity. Her works resist fastened meanings, inviting motion, reflection, and the gradual unfolding of latest methods of seeing—nurturing a renewed sensitivity to ambiguity. Together with her finely tuned sensibility, Chan constructs sculptures which can be as poetic as they’re investigative. Amid ecological precarity and cultural amnesia, Spiral Diaries unfolds a fabric vocabulary for remembering, sensing, and imagining in any other case.
—Teresa Retzer, 2025
at Klemm’s, Berlin
till June 8, 2025
