June 25th, 2026 — Hong Kong–based artist Leelee Chan (CRF 2025) has opened her first museum solo exhibition, Hybrid Palimpsests, at the HE Art Museum in Foshan, China. Now in its final days, on view through June 30th, the exhibition brings together work developed over the past seven years alongside three newly commissioned outdoor sculptures, marking an important milestone in Chan’s evolving practice.
Borrowing its title from the idea of the palimpsest—a manuscript written, erased, and written over again while retaining traces of earlier marks—the exhibition considers sculpture as a record of accumulated histories. Throughout the presentation, Leelee examines how industrial materials, found objects, ancient artifacts, and organic forms carry evidence of geological, cultural, and biological time, revealing the layered relationships between people, place, and matter.
Working across carving, casting, inlay, and assemblage, Leelee transforms urban debris, architectural fragments, and archaeological references into sculptures that resist simple distinctions between natural and manufactured, ancient and contemporary. Rather than erasing an object’s past, her interventions preserve its previous lives while opening new possibilities for interpretation. The resulting works ask viewers to reconsider where intelligence, memory, and transformation reside—not solely in human intention, but within the materials themselves.
New works created for the exhibition expand Leelee’s long-standing interest in metamorphosis and adaptation. Inspired in part by recent scientific research into peppered moth caterpillars, whose bodies can respond to their surroundings in unexpected ways, these sculptures connect biological evolution with industrial design, reflecting Leelee’s ongoing fascination with the hidden systems that shape both the natural and built worlds.
Critics have praised Hybrid Palimpsests for its richly layered approach to sculpture and its ability to collapse multiple temporalities into a single visual language. By bringing together materials associated with extraction, commerce, ritual, and ecology, Leelee constructs works that invite sustained reflection on how objects accumulate meaning across generations.
We congratulate Leelee on this remarkable achievement and are thrilled to celebrate this significant moment in her career!
Learn more and plan your visit at hem.org.