Review: Leelee Chan’s ‘Hybrid Palimpsests’ at He Art Museum

“She sells seashells by the seashore” is a famous tongue twister which is often attributed to Mary Anning, the 19th century British palaeontologist who was considered “amateur” only as far as women could not study science professionally at the time. Nevertheless, Anning gained prominence through her skill at finding dinosaur fossils, including being the first to discover an extinct marine reptile Ichthyosaur skeleton when she was twelve years old. While much of Anning’s accomplishments can be attributed to the shores of Lyme Regis where a museum has since been built in her honour, the so-called “Jurassic coast” likewise served as the place Anning supposedly sold seashells to make ends meet.

Vestiges of the seaside appear in Hong Kong artist Leelee Chan’s sculptural work, too, as her solo presentation, Hybrid Palimpsests for the Young Artist Project series reveals at He Art Museum. As a site, the private museum holds a strong architectural presence within the Shunde district of Foshan, about 100 kilometres northwest of Hong Kong. Set within a lush sculpture garden, including three new outdoor pieces from Chan’s Blindfold Receptor series, the building boasts a circular, tiered, multi-level, shell-like exterior, resulting in what the museum describes as the “eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy.”

Chan’s work — itself known for combining natural and industrial elements — is complimented by the building, conceived by Pritzker-prize winning architect Tadao Ando, in a design that formally echoes the circular layout of museums like the Guggenheim in New York. Inside are several lower-level galleries where the remainder of Chan’s first one-person museum exhibition traces her work over a seven-year time span. This includes her current research on the “secret life and curious afterlife” of seashells for works like “Shapeshifter (Volva)” (2025). As “the sculpted homes” protecting the mollusc animal species, seashells have their own internal logic systems which Chan applies to her artworks. Used to adorn both small and large-scale pieces, these function as “bellwethers of our impact on the natural world.”

Conceived as part of the Museum’s young artists’ series, Hybrid Palimpsests is not a survey, thus allowing the exhibition to track the production and growth of Chan’s body of work without needing to be exhaustive, documentary or considered “complete.” As such, the exhibition places these works in a parenthetical relationship to a range of sculptural traditions past and present, and with an eye on the future.

The result hovers somewhere between works embedded with dynastic remnants of Chinese earthen heads and hands, a selection of which are collectively shown like ancient artefacts atop concrete brick pillars in one room, to those containing materials which Chan uses to explore eco-sensitivity in the face of AI questioning the nature of materiality itself. In a time of immersive experiences and performative works as par for the course in programming used to “activate” museums, Hybrid Palimpsests draws a firmer line between (her) object and (you) subject, seemingly unable or unwilling to give up presenting discrete art objects for unencumbered consideration and contemplation, straight up, just yet.

In effect, any “hybridity,” as the exhibition title suggests, lies in the work itself. Chan, who is increasingly producing sculpture by employing age-old techniques like stone carving, continues to insist on modes of prolonging time and revealing the human labour behind the making of things. This appears to extend to her interest in “palimpsests”: a medieval age form of recycling whereby a manuscript, usually made of papyrus or parchment is reused, and in being written on repeatedly, results in some of its prior markings remaining visible. In an urban context, this term refers to an object or location that contains diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface of the many cities we live in today. Whether these layers are temporal, spatial, or even imaginary, an urban city and its constant transformation are exemplary embodiments of a seemingly never-ending palimpsest at work.

As such, Chan’s exhibition is appropriately located underground, evoking the origin story of the materials comprising much of her work. Chan then adds her own layers through sometimes found, sometimes fabricated elements for pieces which in combination sit firmly, if not always easily within their “hybrid” states of being. 

In fact, many works unearth how Chan has always combined readymade industrial objects, like shipping pallets, with natural elements or their surrogates, such as the golden-sprayed floral accents helping to make “Dark Light, Subterranean Circuit” (2023) appear part gothic-stained glass window, part trellis, while lending the two-part wall and floor work a transcendental aspect. Elsewhere, “Wood Wide Web (Unearth)” (2026), uses wood branches to form tentacles cast in bronze, thus breaking from the source material, appearing synaptic and otherworldly in its final manifestation.

In other words, readymade objects — pallets, egg cartons, hex nut fasteners — the artist often used to assemble works in the past appear less obvious here; instead, being represented by Chan through moulds or by scaling up her source material to be more robust, if in increasingly abstract proportions. Then again, this process feeds how material reality and by extension, its human makers and shapers, are themselves being led to their breaking point. 

Chan’s response? To reiterate her commitment to seemingly outmoded techniques and forms while advancing her own practice. Regardless, there remains an ongoing fascination with what came before and showing it, along with her abiding respect for those who continue to inspire her, from Mary Anning’s shell game to the sun tunnels of Nancy Holt for “Double Passage (Verdigris)” (2024). In the end, Hybrid Palimpsests is marked by Chan’s curiosity about the world around her, and the ability to externalise an inherent sense of self through an increasingly confident “maker’s mark” which embeds itself through the resulting work, whatever the current climate dictates.

Maybe that’s why so much of what is being shown at He Art Museum is not fixated on youth at all but rather on growth and metamorphosis. For example, Chan references many types of shells throughout the exhibition: seashells, eggshells, and in moulds used to move away from readymade sources when making works like “Maker’s Egg Cases” (2026).

These shells, like her reference to parchment, itself made from animal skins, connects Chan’s outdoor 2026 Blindfold Receptor series (“Xanthodes,” “Milionia Zonea,” “Spotted Skipper”) to “Chrysalis (lunar)” (2026) and “Moth (Emperor, Pink lined Sphinx)” (2024) indoors. Based on caterpillars and moths, all imply a life cycle which depends on the camouflage or shedding of skins to reach their full potential. Such biomorphic conditions have increasingly embedded themselves within Chan’s work, showing aesthetically how the past clings to the present. Likewise, the shadows they create follow viewers as they move about within the museum’s underground lair, itself connecting to the mines and quarries Chan previously visited during her travels as the 2020 BMW Art Basel Art Journey winner.

“What emerges is a material record of how value is ascribed, forgotten, and reclaimed,” according to the e-brochure, much like art itself — a sentiment works such as “The Grip” (2020) can attest to, and artists like Leelee Chan insist on, as but one claim to personhood through artmaking. Luckily, audiences can still experience this for themselves in Hybrid Palimpsests, as the exhibition has been extended through 19 July.