Leelee Chan | Spiral Diaries | KLEMM’S | 02.05.-06.06.2025

KLEMM’S presents the second solo exhibition Spiral Diaries, by Leelee Chan (b. 1984, Hong Kong) showcasing a brand new body of work for Gallery Weekend Berlin 2025.

For her second exhibition with Klemm’s, Spiral Diaries, Chan presents a new body of dexterously layered sculptures featuring bronze, stone, glass, and metal elements, incorporating found natural and industrial materials. In this new body of works, she employs old-world artisanal practices, lost-wax bronze casting, and stone carving, together with technological advancements such as CNC milling, tempered glass, and 3D printed metal, giving the resulting sculptures both a classical and futuristic tone.

In this new series, Chan readdresses elements that have structured her work over the years, such as shells, plastic egg packaging, or hex nuts. Interplaying their diverse physical properties and cultural meanings, Chan continues her investigation of materiality and layered temporality through her astute sensitivity to material objects and her deep reverence for process. In Spiral Diaries, the recurring motifs of natural forms, mollusks, plants, and whelk egg cases probe her perpetual fascination with the unsettling metamorphosis of the natural world, particularly the mollusk’s supreme resilience and their ability to shapeshift by reconfiguring and repurposing individual body parts through natural selection for billions of years.

Leelee Chan, studio view, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Klemm’s, Berlin.  

As shell-makers, mollusks are architects that have turned calcium carbonate in the seawater into ceramic spirals whose afterlife has penetrated human civilization since prehistoric times. Biologists suggest that mollusks can read the patterns on their spiral shells as though they were diary entries, a vital element for their memory and orientation before continuing their construction. In this way, the patterns become a collection of memories etched across their shells, almost like a depiction of movement through time without a complete final image.

Instead of a juxtaposition, Chan’s sculptures propose rather a form of composition that encompasses multiple stages of the same material history, thus reflecting the entanglement with the more-than-human world and proposing an alternative way of thinking and learning from other forms of intelligence. In doing so, they underline the irreversible modifications of morphology caused by human decisions as they question the fundamental notion of progress and development, ultimately offering an alternative view of the Western constructs of human-centric advancement and growth.

Vernissage: Friday, 2. May 2025, from 6 to 9 pm