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The Remaining Traces and Distortions of Perception, Memory and Phenomena
In the Folds of Wave and Time
It was a series of coincidental encounters, which led me to rediscover and understand some thoughts anew. I even realise how little I actually knew about things that I’d long taken for granted.
Before my artist-in-residence in Chicago began, I had conceived an initial idea about collecting how individuals remember and interpret the same subject. This thought originated from my experiences of observing the sea and from the accumulation of my past creative work. When gazing toward the far side of the sea, the horizon where it meets the sky appears almost within reach, yet never able to touch. While that distance is constant, its measure shifts according to one’s point of view—we are used to saying the sea is blue, but more often, she is indigo, crimson, orange, golden, dark cyan, or white… More precisely, she is colourless, transparent. Her hue changes every moment with the light of the sky, the refraction of air and dust, throughout the shifting time of day. Even as we take her blue, the blue we each see is never quite the same; so is the sea in our memory, varying from one another. In this sense, the sea feels like an immense lost object—she can never be possessed, and her beauty, never shared and conveyed in full.
As Josef Albers [1] once said, “if one says 'red'—the name of a colour—and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.” Learning the meaning of the word “red” often happens to be the same thing as learning how to use it. That is why one can only say it by instinct—as the word has not been learnt through some abstract definitions, but by participating in the game of language [2]. Likewise, even when we all make use of language, our differing experiences and perceptions of the world forbid us to ever truly grasp another person, or even fully understand ourselves.
Signs and signals are constantly in a state of flux, as we perceive the world through our flesh. Plato once told the allegory of the cave, where a group of prisoners spend their lives watching shadows cast upon the dark cave wall, gradually forgetting that what they see are merely reflections of the real world. One who breaks free tries to leave, only to have his eyes dazzled and pained by the light; yet through that painful awakening, he begins to see a different reality. Is that cave our body, our memory, or our thoughts? Our eyes and brains are as well like caves—the images we see are mere projections cast onto the retina, and through this inner mechanism, we constantly measure the distance between ourselves and the world. The world we know is composed of perceptions, memories, and thoughts, amid which the person in action and the world that awaits activation intersect, as if folded into countless layers. A sudden sound, a spoken phrase, a scene, or a passage of text, would be readily soaked up, triggering our unconscious or habitual responses. Energy and signals are fermented, settling, and transforming in the dark, never truly gone. These fragments are one side of the world, and we ourselves are mirrors reflecting its sides. Oftentimes, I fail to discern my own emotions and reactions, or to realize where they originate. I am still exploring how to relate to others and get along with myself, as if searching within reality, a temporary and safe entry point or position for myself.
Yet because of impermanence and constant change, every encounter is a form of invitation and affirmation, allowing me to listen once again.
As my first overseas residency and my first time setting foot in the United States, the journey still felt somewhat unreal to me before arrival. Apart from two online meetings beforehand and some basic information provided, I tried to come here without any preconceptions or expectations. Simply taking it as an experience, I wonder where pure intuition and a state of complete openness might lead me.
“There’s a huge lake there—almost as vast as the sea.” Before I left for Chicago, this was the description I got from most people. Indeed, the lake in Chicago is expansive. I stayed near the lakeside in a two-storey house. Perhaps because of the proximity to the lake, July felt pleasantly cool even in the height of summer. Looking from the living room’s side window is the lakeview framed in a rectangle. As I descend the stairs early in the morning every day, I would pass by the window and catch a glimpse of the lake’s changing surface. During the first week, jet lag often had me awake at four or five in the morning. The lake at that hour was exceptionally still, with only faint ripples. At the break of dawn, the sun’s reflection over the surface appeared as a piece of golden silk fallen gently upon the water.
I had assumed the lake’s surface would be much calmer than the sea’s, yet on several mornings I was awakened by the sound of waves—only then I was reminded that Chicago is the “Windy City”. The house felt like a large musical instrument. During the days that I stayed in, I placed a recorder on the staircase, and listened to the wind that slipped through the door cracks, lifting the curtains, the raindrops tapping on the skylight, the footsteps of neighbours, and the waves not far away, breaking against the rocky shore.
On my second day in Chicago, I visited the Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) to meet the staff and my artist liaison. We briefly discussed my residency plans and venue arrangement—perhaps presenting its outcome as an open studio or a mobile presentation. After that meeting, I spent most of the time on my own during the following weeks. I am quite used to solitude, and in a city as large as Chicago, being on my own did not feel particularly lonely. Sometimes I took walks around the neighbourhood, visited museums downtown, watched jazz or indie band performances, or browsed art book fairs. Occasionally, I would go swimming at the lake with my host, Carole, and the neighbours, and spend an entire day there. Day lengths of summer in Chicago are long—bright from six in the morning till nine at night—and even at eight, one can still swim in the lake. The neighbours would observe the surface of the lake each day, entering only when the water was calm; after all, summer is brief and precious to the Chicagoans. This difference in time perception, along with the effects of jet lag, momentarily disrupted my daily rhythm.
When I first began the soundpocket artist support programme, I had plenty of imaginations about how the residency would take shape. At times, I would feel uneasy, worried that I was not proactive enough and not good at socialising, and that it would be difficult to build connections in a completely foreign place. But later I came to realise, even the stillness, idleness, or just simply being present in the process, are all a form of active intervention in the moment.
On my walks around the neighbourhood or on the way to the bus stop, I often passed by a thrift store selling all kinds of discarded objects: furniture, books, clothings, tableware, film slides, and even other people’s photographs and albums. As I flipped through them, I found many pictures from the 1930s to the 1970s, where the same faces appeared over and over again in different scenes. When I asked the shopkeeper where these items came from, he told me that they were usually asked to be collected directly from the houses of those who are moving—things they no longer wanted, including many family and travel photos. Seeing these seemingly precious and intimate images sold or abandoned called forth many questions and imaginings in me. I then transformed my initial idea of collecting memories into a little pastime for myself: to begin the search, in this city without a sea, for photographs others have taken along the shoreline.
[image] Some photos on the horizon found in the thrift store.
There were far more of these photographs than I had imagined, each showing a distinct horizon line, though their locations and year taken were unknown. The inner dialogue that emerged while looking through them, together with my contemplations on memory, prompted me to begin collecting from the thrift store these images taken by different people, in different shorelines and times. These fragmented pieces of memory could never form a complete story, while the memories, or the photograph itself, are constantly being rearranged or arbitrarily rewritten. Eventually, I used these photographs to create one of the works featured in the exhibition, The Sound from Distant Shores (2025), which was an attempt to reconstruct a narrative about punctum [3] and memory.
Before departing, I had prepared several invitation letters on “memory collection” in Hong Kong, hoping to gather people’s memories of the sea and its colours through text or sound recordings while I was here. But I later noticed that I had accidentally repeated a paragraph in the letter, and as I carefully used correction fluid to blot out the extra part, word by word, the sound of waves came through the window, and I felt as if I was lining up the little white pebbles along the shore [see image below].
The two houses were connected to each other, and Carole often came over through the terrace or the basement door to sit and chat about her past experiences in creating works. She is also an artist, advanced in years. I shared with her the photographs I had found at the thrift store and the book of Oriental travelogues. In turn, she told me she was sorting through her personal belongings and felt it was better to let those memories disappear meaningfully, rather than to preserve or restore them. Last year, she presented a piece of performance art, where she burned letters accumulated over many years, as a ritual for handling relics. This conversation engendered new thoughts on handling the photographs that were with me. I had originally planned an experiment: to place the photos in a glass fish tank and soak them for a week, then setting it in a corner of ESS for others to observe the changes. Carole gave me some photos she planned to discard—images of her younger self, gatherings with friends, her family, travel scenery, and the neighbourhood. She also found me a glass fish tank, which reminded me of the Shedd Aquarium I had visited earlier in Chicago. It was a massive tank situated by an inland lake, housing large and small marine creatures from various waters, creating an odd sense of mismatch. Later, I thought: since the lake was right there, why not soak the photos directly in the lake and see what effects would it create. So the fish tank was repurposed for something else.
I bound over a hundred photos Carole had given me into two bundles with iron wires and placed them in the lake for a week, letting the waves, the sand and gravel along the shoreline lap against them. For the first two days, the photo paper began to wrinkle, but the images remained intact. But during the week, there were several rains, and the strong winds whipped up larger waves than usual. On the third day, the chemicals in the photo paper began to soften, and the relentless battering left many scratches on the surface. By the weekend, the chemicals had eroded and dissolved; details of some photos faded entirely, though faint yellow traces often remained. In the end, only one bundle survived—the other was lost. Do memories get forgotten, or do they sink in like sediments, transforming or moving elsewhere to exist in new forms? I summarised this process of change in the work Sediments #2 (2025). Meanwhile, Trace in Resonance (2025) places sound inside a glass tank, and as the sound reverberates and collides within the space, certain details fade away naturally.
Originally, I had only planned a simple mobile display. But a week prior to the exhibition, I was suddenly informed that there was an available exhibition space in ESS, thus I developed these fragmented thoughts and works into the present exhibition In the Folds of Wave and Time [4]. The exhibition takes perception and the sea’s constant change of colour as the starting point, and through these creative works, continues the exploration of the traces and distortions between memory and perception, piecing together a visible scene constructed from the remnants of individual memories.
[Image] Exhibition poster, In the Folds of Wave and Time at Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, Illinois, the United States.
Written in Tuen Mun on 17th November, 2025.
English translated by Emily Cheung
[1] Quote from Josef Albers (1888–1976), German Bauhaus art theorist, author of Interaction of Colour.
[2] Quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).
[3] In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes defines “Punctum” as a poignant detail that unexpectedly pricks the viewer, evoking personal emotional resonance. It is neither the centre nor the subject, yet unable to ignore.
[4] The exhibition In the folds of wave and time begins from her perception of the ever-shifting colours of the ocean. Helen is now working on the project In the folds of wave and time, which aims to continue her exploration of the traces and distortions that occur between memory and perception. During her residency, while creating images, writings, and drawings, Helen has also collected other people’s memories and field recordings within the Chicago community. She has assembled these materials with those she brought from Hong Kong, weaving the individual memories and traces into a visible scene.
In the exhibition, Helen showcased these materials and invited the audience into a fluid exchange of retrieving memories and perceptions, asking how the shoreline —as a singular yet shared subject—fractures across disparate recollections and interpretations. During the Artist Sharing, she will share how fleeting moments of awareness seep into her practice, how light and the ocean refract perception, and how text and image splice together their fragments.
Acknowledgement
soundpocket
Experimental Sound Studio
Hong Kong Art Development Council
Mandy
Lianna
Carole McCurdy
Olivia
Adam
Alex
James
Yuki
Jay