ARCH GALLERY is delighted to announce that its inaugural exhibition at the new Shanghai space will officially open to the public on March 19, 2025. The debut exhibition brings together works by eight artists: Cao Taiping, Huang Peishan, Huang Xiaoliang, Luo Mingjun, Xu Danqing, Robin Megannity, Vanessa Su, and Siobhan McBride.
In this era dominated by algorithms and immediacy, memory has shed the deterministic cloak of linear narrative, evolving into a kind of "temporal insurrection" akin to Marcel Proust’s portrayal—one that hurls us into the fault lines of consciousness through the whispers of the senses rather than the declarations of logic. Triggered by sensation, it becomes a disordered surge that breaks through the constraints of time and reason. Just as, in the vast, boundless, profound blue depths, undercurrents flow silently yet powerfully, disrupting the seemingly eternal calm, memory similarly stirs waves of unrest in the subtle recesses of consciousness.
This exhibition seeks to capture the spectral nature of such "involuntary memory" (Mémoire involontaire) – a true memory that cannot be consciously recalled through will but is instead triggered by accidental sensory stimuli, such as taste or touch – drifting quietly through the fissures of awareness. It is neither an exact replica of history nor a cold prophecy of the future, but rather like the madeleine soaked in tea from Proust’s writing: in an inadvertent moment, a sensory tremor throws us into the folds of time, allowing the stars of the past and the dust of the present to resonate in the depths of perception.
