Heidi Lau & Leelee Chan Chrysalis Spectre

A plastic moth made from a shipping pallet rests on a white wall. A miniature ceramic pagoda rises out of a funerary vessel. Such tricks of scale and materiality define the topsy-turvy worlds of self-taught sculptors Heidi Lau and Leelee Chan, whose dual exhibition, Chrysalis Spectre, at Matthew Brown marks a convergence of their interests in the alchemical and the arcane.

Central to both of their artistic practices is a reverence for relics, a belief that emotions and narratives can be held within objects in powerful ways. Yet what the two artists do extends beyond merely referencing or utilizing classical objects and aesthetics. They are rather concerned with deeper issues of memory and myth, of how hierarchies form and how value is ascribed. More alchemy than archeology, their sculptural practices revolve around states of change, as seen in mysterious hybrid forms that straddle the boundaries between past and future, between the living and the dead.

If the realms that Lau envisions are mired in chaos and contradiction, it is because these conditions govern reality as she sees it. The spaces we inhabit are inexorably shaped by cycles of birth and decay, aspiration and failure. This is manifest in Lau’s home city of Macau, where traditional Chinese-style gardens and crumbling colonial architecture exist side by side with recently built casinos that house tacky simulacra of European monuments. Versions of the past are coeval with competing visions of the future—an absurd, pluralistic, and non-linear temporality that is also captured in Lau’s Spirit Vessels (2020–present). Influenced by mingqi (ancient Chinese burial objects), these sculptures merge elements of urns, architectural ruins, and fantastical landscapes.

Other recent works push further into abstraction, with orbs and orifices visible in vaguely geologic or coralloid formations. Occasionally a ghostly hand or face can be distinguished, as if otherworldly beings are struggling to escape from their ceramic confines. Informed by the Chinese Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a millennia-old compendium of mythical lands and beasts, Lau’s new works are chimeric and ambiguous, alluding to non-hierarchical, fluctuating states of being in which the animal, vegetal, mineral, and artificial coalesce.

In Leelee Chan’s practice, too, disparate elements meld in unexpected ways. Employing all manner of urban detritus, ancient artifacts, and industrial and organic materials, Chan creates sculptures with complex interlocking parts and layered constructions. In Chan’s Lucid Formation series (2022–present), the small hollows in black shipping pallets are filled with brightly colored resins to evoke the stained-glass windows of Lingnan architecture, while her wall-mounted Moth sculptures (2023–present) utilize slabs of petrified wood and natural magnesium to suggest the velvet flutter of lepidopteran wings.

Chan brings her expertise in Chinese artifacts to bear on Double Passage (Verdigris) (2024), in which two discs inspired by jade bi are placed on top of a shipping pallet between vertically oriented bumper packaging. Bi were historically placed in the graves of high-status individuals, and thought to symbolize a connection between the earth and the heavens. Sans human body, Chan’s onyx bi invoke more abstract flows of energy between the artwork and its environs.

Also incorporating antiques are Chan’s Present Relics (2020–present). In these small-scale works, the artist recombines mingqi fragments with contemporary readymade objects to engage layered temporalities. Chan imbues these works with a feeling of spontaneity, testing different arrangements of objects to see what curious patterns might emerge.

Both Chan and Lau favor experimental approaches over strictly outcome-directed modes of working. “When we start a sculpture, we don’t do sketches,” Chan says. “We’re very drawn to this sense of the unknown, trusting that the materials and the process will take us somewhere.” To immerse oneself in their work is to go on this journey with them, and enter anachronistic realms richly populated by specters and shapeshifters.

–Ophelia Lai