Iris Wu, untitled (drawer #2), 2026. Photo by Ridwana Rahman.
When Blurry Memories Awaken (Nguyen Wahed)
By Chloe Alto, April 7, 2026
In Jungian and Freudian models of the psyche, the self does not arrive fully formed. It flickers into being. To posit its shape takes layers of recursive framing, recollection, distortion and returns to the past. Through these operations, a fuzzy outline begins to cohere. At Nguyen Wahed, it is this haze that When Blurry Memories Awaken chooses to illuminate. As curator Freya Xu states, blurry memory is not simply a residue of forgetting, but the inherent form through which memory exists.
Here, experiments with the subconscious are rendered in multimedia. The show operates through strategies of layering, fading, transparency, weathering, repetition, and trace. Hafsa Nouman’s white paintings are multiplicitous, referencing her childhood home, the white wall it sits on, and simulating the glare from outside the gallery. Shadowy digital prints by Haidong Yang are hung for depth and dimension, recalling Wolfgang Tilmans, taking on all its ridges and bumps. A three-pronged set of flatscreen TVs anchors the space, apt to the gallery’s interest in digital mediums. Viewers do not stand in front of the TV to watch Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee’s Same River Twice, but follow it around the bend. The video loops sequential photographic prints, emanating shadows of total darkness and bouts of blue and silver light. Though each section is relegated to a different artist, paintings remain in conversation with the central screens, reflecting pulsing light onto sheet metal, back onto paper, onto multi-panel canvases, then onto ceramic. If one listens closely, it is Lee’s video triptych Same River Twice playing the soundtrack to Days of Being Wild that fills the space.
Ruoyu Gong’s Dreamy Dreams and Wandi Ni’s The Roots Remember extend the show’s inquiry into visual representations of memory through painting. Languid brushstrokes by both painters reveal discernible forms, nodding to neo-automatism. Though Gong's work turns to the inward psyche, recalling recurring personal motifs of submission, Ni’s gestures outward, toward regenerative posthuman conditions. In her practice, blurriness is not incidental but an aesthetic and political choice.
When Blurry Memories Awaken arrives at a moment where there is seemingly little tolerance for blur. As technology promises our lives eternally archived, blurry memories may soon be rendered obsolete. The future will be recorded in crisp 360-degree imagery.
Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, Moth at Noon, 2024. Photo by Haidong Yang.
Haidong Yang, The Elephant in the Grass, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Yet in its campaign for omniscience, the technocracy still remains imperfect. The Freudian “screen memory,” reconciles the memories we conjure to the conscious mind as clear, digestible images. Do not mistake these memories for truths; they act as screens, both structured to be projected onto, and obstruct what lies behind it. What hides behind our screen memories are ambiguous origins, fragments, false recollections and allusive narratives, displaced and all to be found again. The current Screen Age then, must also buckle under and crack.
In Same River Twice (2020), Lee attempts to retrace her hometown routes in Hong Kong through digital maps. But across the landscape of the iconic, virtually imaged Harcourt Road, there are glitches. High-rises and street lamps splinter. In place of the sun, a looming black circle. The Screen Age, in its quest for objectivity, instead fractures before our eyes. The world is increasingly mapped and imaged, yet becomes unrendered, absent or pixelated; formally, a digital blur.
Recalling a memory then, even digitally, can never truly render a singular past. When Blurry Memories Awaken argues that remembrance is a generative process actively occurring in the present. Hafsa Nouman’s exposed canvas edges, marked by bare drips, expand past memory into a surface in the present. Metal gates are both a window to the past and the physical erosion of a wall in the present space. The Dragon, Covered is not a ruin, but Yang’s image of a real statue in Chengdu, covered with entropic AI-generated grass and greenery. Layers of data-mined images pile up to shroud the real and distance us from the past. Technology shifts from the purpose of clarity to obscurity. This is not decay, but generation. In this creation, there is blur.
The final piece in the show is a ceramic, Jingyi Zhang’s Soft Form. It hovers between states. Its title negates determination. Perhaps it is a bowl, or a fountain, or a flower blossoming. Its opacity obfuscates any trace of the past. Perhaps its form will be revealed to us, discernible to the future self. For now, it does not resolve; it does not need to.
*If When Blurry Memories Awaken finds blurriness as a critical space for memories, the parallel group show downstairs, Umarell’s APRIL, organized by Giorgia Alliata, considers déjà vu. Clinically understood as a brief misfiring of the temporal lobe where the new registers as intensely familiar, the exhibition stages this response spatially. Entry is through a hatch door, opening up the sidewalk viewers may be familiar walking on, but not into. Above the latch of the basement door, a photograph of the sidewalk with an added mannequin bust (Ke Zhang). A pair of ceramic red boots (Devon Pin-Yu Chen) sit by the door, a shelf of found objects render nearly domestic enough to negate unfamiliarity (Soomin Kang, Shoe Rack). Patterned Tusi Circles (Zaid Arshad) appear, then reappear again in different locations. Planks of wood seem structural until they appear surreptitiously painted (Fernan Bilik). The udder of a cow protrudes as a high relief (Liz Schneider). A tiny mouse lives in the chink of a wall (Iris Wu, untitled (drawer #2)). Subtle displacements produce unpredictable bouts of the uncanny. Upon leaving, watch your head; then notice the marbles fixed to the ceiling (Candela Bado, constellation).
When Blurry Memories Awaken is on view at Nguyen Wahed through March 31st.
Soomin Kang, Shoe Rack, 2026. Photo by Ridwana Rahman.