Lyric Shen
There is an occlusion
March 28 - April 26, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, March 28, 6-8pm
The grains of hail are next to my face and stay on the paper longer than the warm pavement. The house is the reason why my body has never belonged to me.
Silke Lindner is excited to present There is an occlusion, Lyric Shen’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Shen’s practice creates sites of diffusion by pairing ancient crafts like papermaking and casting porcelain with contemporary processes, such as inkjet printing and the use of digital images and videos. Primarily engaging with image, sculpture, and writing, Shen meditates on memory, exile, transference, and privacy.
In the center of the gallery, Shen reconstructs a room from the Japanese colonial home that her mother lived in with seven family members from 1961 to 1967 in Yilan during KMT martial law. In the absence of photographs or floor plans and based solely on drawings and oral history retained by her mother, Shen creates an imprint of the home rather than a facsimile. The room is constructed with found wood, handmade paper and clay. The structure brings to life a mysterious recurring nightmare she and her mother share in which a home intrusion occurs in a room with windows made of paper. Using hand-processed kozo (mulberry) and abaca, chosen for their physical attributes and historical use in architecture, Shen casts the roof and window of the structure and the gallery’s column in translucent sheets of paper, formed with hand processed fibers and artist-made molds.
In a new suite of porcelain and stoneware pieces, Shen uses her familiar water transfer technique to seal images from personal archives onto their surfaces, creating compositions with dissolved contours. In some of them, ambient spaces become the foreground, personal but void of figures. In others, various subjects are captured in evanescent portraiture.
In addition to its clinical definition, an occlusion is also a term used by hand-papermakers to describe when unwanted particles like hair or dust become occluded in a sheet. Considering each sheet of paper and layer of ink as a membrane, Shen narrates through material how experiences are embedded within surfaces, and how they are remembered in the body in everyday life.
Lyric Shen (b. Goleta, California, 1993) lives and works in New York. She completed an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI and received a BA in Book Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. Solo and two-person exhibitions include ‘Promise’s Room’ at Silke Lindner (2023), ‘The Petal’ at Et al, San Francisco (2023) and ‘Biscuit’ at Canada, New York (2022). She has been included in several group exhibitions, most recently in ‘SL x RE’, Rose Easton (London), ‘Contemporary Fossil Record’ at Jack Hanley Gallery, ‘Reciprocity’ at Marinaro (New York), and JUNK IS NO GOOD BABY, Silke Lindner (New York). She will be included in ‘Human Marks’ at Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, Hartford, CT in September of 2025.