A Place of Return

A Place of Return began as an exhibition project that brought together my Jiangnan garden paintings, made years earlier in China, with the historic stone basement of the Malta Society of Arts. The initial idea was to let two very different spatial and cultural experiences enter into dialogue. For visitors, this remained the central experience of the exhibition throughout: a place in which to step away from the pace outside, slow down, and return inward. a place of return.pdf

During the development of the exhibition, however, I began to understand the whole project as a three-week social installation. The paintings were no longer the only centre of the work. The basement architecture, sound and projected imagery, my continuous presence during all opening hours, the arrival and departure of visitors, spontaneous conversations, interactions, silence, waiting, and uneventful periods all became part of the conditions through which the work existed. There was no prescribed viewing route and no programmed form of participation. The work emerged over time through relationships between people, artworks, space, and one another. Project Text-The Artist Present-Three Weeks in the Basement.pdf

For visitors, A Place of Return could therefore remain simply an exhibition. For me, it also became a social installation concerned with space, duration, presence, and relation.

When the physical exhibition ended, the work did not end with it. I continued working with the writing, photographs, videos, guestbook entries, correspondence, and media materials accumulated over the three weeks, using writing to re-enter the experience and understand what the installation had meant to me. Three Weeks in the Basement grew out of this process. The book does not simply document the exhibition; through writing, it completes another part of the work and extends it beyond the physical space in which it first took place.