As If Seen Before: On the Things That Were Never Fully Forgotten
by Shuhan Zhang, June 2, 2026
Installation view of As if Seen Before. Photo by Echo Youyi Yan. Courtesy of the artist.
Installation view of As if Seen Before. Photo by Echo Youyi Yan. Courtesy of the artist.
Sometimes, my sense of the past does not return through any major event that clearly happened. More often, it arrives through very small things: the faint smell of leftovers when opening the refrigerator late at night, the dusty scent lingering inside cardboard boxes after moving apartments, the sound of cheap plastic packaging being crumpled, the reflection of kitchen light on a table surface, or the traces of someone’s daily life that remain in a room after they have already left. None of these fragments form a complete memory. In many cases, they can no longer even be connected to a specific person or moment. Yet the body recognizes them before consciousness does. For a brief instant, a strange hesitation emerges, as if I have somehow experienced all of this before.
Freud once used the term unheimlich—the uncanny—to describe this condition in which something familiar suddenly becomes strange, while something strange simultaneously carries an inexplicable intimacy. As If Seen Before, curated by April Liu, inhabits precisely this unstable territory between recognition and misrecognition. Rather than constructing a linear narrative about memory or belonging, the exhibition allows viewers to enter a space already lightly soaked in time. Sculpture, sound, scent, archives, packaging materials, bodily structures, and performative traces overlap with one another until the exhibition itself begins to resemble a slowly fermenting perceptual container. Viewing here is no longer a process of confirming meaning, but one of continually approaching residue: you feel as though you recognize something, yet you can never fully explain where it comes from.
This unstable familiarity permeates the exhibition. Margeaux Abeyta’s sound installation resists conventional narration and instead unfolds like echoes slowly surfacing from within the land itself. Voices tied to oral history and landscape fracture, pause, and repeat throughout the space, as though memory itself were undergoing decay. The viewer cannot fully grasp these sounds, yet remains persistently drawn toward them. The experience recalls Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum in Camera Lucida: what truly wounds the viewer is often not the image as a whole, but a small detail that escapes explanation. It punctures perception and suddenly reveals the existence of a time that has already vanished. Many works in As If Seen Before possess this quality of puncture. They are incomplete, unstable, and unresolved, yet continue to emit delayed emotional aftereffects.
The repeated appearance of domestic materials throughout the exhibition, such as packaging, tables, containers, fences, textiles, and food remnants, gradually shifts intimacy away from warmth and toward something more physically complex. In Jenna Clouse’s work, expanding, swollen, adhesive surfaces resemble the accumulated residue of domestic labor over time. These materials are never fully organized into stable sculptural forms, but remain suspended in a condition of ongoingness. Looking at them evokes aspects of daily life that often go unnoticed: children’s toys left behind, plastic bags in kitchen corners, household objects warped through prolonged use. The materials appear to slowly consume the space itself, much like emotions silently sedimenting into the body over long durations. In this sense, the work recalls Judith Butler’s discussions of care labor: the invisible forms of labor that sustain everyday life while continuously shaping bodies and relationships.
Megita Denton’s use of scent further destabilizes the visual dominance of spectatorship. Smell is an extraordinarily unstable medium; unlike images, it cannot be cleanly preserved, but constantly disperses, fades, and reappears. Yet for precisely this reason, scent often resembles the actual mechanisms of memory more closely than vision does. In In Search of Lost Time, Proust famously describes how the taste of a madeleine unexpectedly unlocks an entire world of memory. The cedar, bodily, and earth-like scents circulating through As If Seen Before carry a similarly involuntary force. They do not explain the past, but instead allow forgotten sensations to rise briefly back to the surface of perception. Viewers may not even be able to identify the source of the emotion they are experiencing, yet instinctively pause before it.
Installation view of As if Seen Before. Photo by Echo Youyi Yan. Courtesy of the artist.
At the same time, many of the exhibition’s structures gradually reveal the disciplinary dimensions hidden within ideas of “home” and “comfort.” Sun-ho Lee’s works, which combine packaging, tea ceremony aesthetics, and industrial materials, initially appear soft and delicate, yet remain permeated by a quiet sense of standardization and compression. Packaging here no longer functions merely as protection, but as a system through which bodies, emotions, and intimacy become organized under capitalism. Repetitive handcraft, soft materials, and consumer symbols intertwine until intimacy itself begins to feel mass-produced. Echo Youyi Yan’s work pushes this sense of regulation further into spatial form. Her enclosed structures and trap-like furniture arrangements never depict violence directly, yet their restraint makes viewers even more aware of the body’s confinement within space. Foucault once argued that modern power rarely appears solely through overt repression; rather, it often enters everyday life through ideas of comfort, order, and security. The works in As If Seen Before repeatedly expose these hidden forms of domestication embedded within structures of home, habitation, and spectatorship. Rey Reyes’s work further shifts this relationship between the body and spectatorship toward something more performative. Her elongated, distorted, and exaggerated bodily forms carry a sense of humor while remaining subtly unsettling. The body here no longer appears as a stable subject, but rather as a visual sign continuously watched, consumed, and reconstructed through repetition. Particularly within the post-digital condition, one’s sense of self increasingly resembles an ongoing performance. In this sense, Reyes’s work also recalls Judith Butler’s notion of performativity: identity is not a fixed essence, but something continually produced through repetition and enactment.
Olivia Saporito’s work, meanwhile, turns the act of viewing itself into something newly perceptible. Shelving systems, supports, archival structures, and display mechanisms do not merely serve the image; they themselves become part of the visual regime organizing perception. As viewers look at the works, they simultaneously become aware of how their own viewing is being directed, structured, and controlled. This recalls Derrida’s writings on the archive: the archive is never simply a place where memory is stored, but a mechanism that determines what can be seen, recorded, and preserved in the first place. Many works in As If Seen Before function similarly. They are less concerned with presenting memory than with revealing the systems through which memory itself becomes shaped by institutions, space, and perception.
In contrast, Ying Ye’s Steam at the Table introduces a slower and warmer current into the exhibition. Through recordings centered around food, migration, and family, the work avoids transforming immigrant experience into grand narrative. Instead, it preserves highly specific and intimate details: the sounds of cooking, conversations around the dinner table, phrases repeated within families over many years. So much of what constitutes “home” can never fully enter official history. It survives instead through kitchen smells, gestures, accents, and the act of sharing food. These details are so ordinary that they are often overlooked, yet they ultimately form the deepest layers of emotional memory itself.
What makes As If Seen Before so affecting is perhaps its refusal to transform memory into a complete, coherent, consumable image of nostalgia. There is no restoration of the past here, nor any stable resolution of belonging. The sounds, materials, packaging, furniture, and bodily traces throughout the exhibition cannot recover lost time. They merely allow certain feelings already in the process of disappearing to briefly surface once again.
And perhaps the things people can never truly forget are precisely those that were never fully articulated in the first place.
About the Author: Shuhan Zhang (b. 2002, China) is a curator and writer. She is currently an M.A. candidate in Visual Arts Administration at New York University and holds a B.A. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her research focuses on digital art, cultural platforms, and the contemporary art market. She has curated exhibitions including After the Face, Lithic Coordinates, Losing Ghosts, A Lure, A Lament, and Spreading Growth. Her writing has been published in Tussle Magazine, IMPULSE Magazine, Art Spiel, and Whitehot Magazine, with a focus on exhibition criticism and contemporary art discourse. She lives and works in New York.
Installation view of As if Seen Before. Photo by Echo Youyi Yan. Courtesy of the artist.