Leelee Chan
Spiral Diaries

2 MAY until 6 JUN 2025

Leelee Chan’s (b. 1984, Hong Kong) sculptures embody hybrid forms intersecting the architectural, biomorphic, and geological, generating visual paradoxes. Reflecting the shifting urban fabric in her immediate surroundings in Hong Kong, Chan’s visceral exploration of the unknown encapsulates her interest in urbanism, economies, architecture, material culture, and antiquities. Her interplay of abstract forms, intricate details, and unexpected materials also drafts a proposal for a haptic itinerary that poeticizes critique as much as it underlines its urgency, resisting easy categorization and transcending the limits of a binary interpretation.

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. Some of these elements were present in her work as early as 2018, for instance in Navel  (2018), a piece where a found seashell is placed right at the center of a Jesmonite and epoxy frame. Another good example is Glass Bead Game, a 2021 small sculpture incorporating a Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) Chinese pottery fragment, alongside brass disc, pigment, stainless steel hex nut, silver-sheen obsidian, unakite, and jasper.

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. 

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.