Wu, Cici, artist, contributor. art ctb

Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned.

[Place of publication not identified] : Rockbund Art Museum, 2025.

1 online resource

"Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned marks the artist's first institutional solo exhibition, bringing together key works from the past decade and centering on a new large-scale, site-specific commission of the same name. Trained at the Critical Intermedia Laboratory at the City University of Hong Kong, her work departs from conventional narrative structures and reconsiders the cinematic apparatus through its most elemental oppositions: light and shadow, reflection and refraction, opacity and trace. Spanning the museum's third floor and the East Staircase, these concerns unfold across hybrid forms that move between film, drawing, architecture, scanned ephemera, and shadow. Among them, handmade paper lanterns recur throughout the exhibition, serving as fragile, luminous vessels for reflecting on memory, erasure, and return. This interest in disappearance and return led Wu to begin working with paper lanterns in 2019, during the development of her film Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon, which revisits the unresolved disappearance of a boy in post-handover Hong Kong. While researching the project, she encountered a handmade lantern in a local market and began to explore its formal and symbolic potential. In Wu's practice, the paper lantern functions like a Bolex camera: modest in scale but expansive in historical and metaphysical reach. Central to the exhibition is Lanterns from the Unreturned (2025), a newly commissioned site-specific installation occupying the museum's East Staircase. Originally built in 1933 for the Royal Asiatic Society, the building was repurposed in the 1970s to store confiscated books during the Cultural Revolution. Wu reanimates this forgotten history through arrangements of lanterns in book form, handcrafted from bamboo and conservation-grade paper traditionally used in rare book restoration. These sculptures line the staircase's windows and interior, echoing the bundled books that once filled the space. The installation imagines a spectral return, volumes drifting back into the building as flickering presences, alive with the possibility of being read once more. At dusk, the lanterns begin to glow, casting inward and outward light, illuminating the museum's East Staircase like a vertical scroll. Visible from Huqiu Road even after the museum's operation hours, these fragile vessels hold space for the unspoken and the unreturned, allowing stories once silenced to shimmer faintly back into view. At a time when history and culture are being contested, erased, and rewritten across the world, Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned creates a space for remembering without resolution, following the traces that remain and offering a quiet reminder that we do not need to forget."-- provided by distributor.

Collective memory.
Motion pictures.
Historiography.
Mémoire collective.
Historiographie.
historiography.

exhibition catalogs.
Ephemera
Exhibition catalogs
Catalogues d'exposition.

Zhu-Nowell, X, curator, contributor, editor.
Wang, Karen, curator, contributor, editor.
Pan, Zhen, editor, translator.
Nowell, Frederick Cruz, editor.
Jin, Xinyan, designer.
Wang, Sue, translator.
Zhang, Chengjiujiu, translator.
Zheng, Zihao, translator.
Library Stack, distributor.