/Exhibition/
Losing Ghosts
Role: Curator
Artists: Hongyu Zhang, Jiwon Rhie, Sona Lee, Xuemeng Li, Ziqi (Tree) Xu
Time: 2026/1/28-2026/1/31
Address: Detour Gallery, 545 W 23rd Street, New York
The Chinese word “Youling” (幽灵) resists any fixed translation. It drifts between the visible and the vanished, lingering in the interstices of memory and forgetting. The ghost is not merely a spirit of the dead, nor a mythic projection of the beyond. It is a floating residue of memory, moving gently at the threshold between dream and consciousness. It wanders through screens, reflections, and digital afterimages, entangling the present with what refuses to disappear. The ghost is not elsewhere; it has long dwelled within us, murmuring beneath the surface of perception.
In Losing Ghosts, the spectral becomes a way to contemplate the elasticity of memory， its delay, looping, and half-awake shimmer. The ghost does not return from the past; it lingers within a state of “deferred presence.” As Jacques Derrida writes in Specters of Marx (1993), the ghost is a being that is both present and absent; it is neither the living nor the dead, but a belated apparition suspended between the two. It never appears in a complete form; instead, it enters the present through delay and recurrence, compelling us to confront what has been repressed, omitted, or obscured. The ghost reveals the complexity of memory; it always coexists with absence, signifying both forgetting and the persistence of what refuses to fade.
At this moment, memory resembles light passing through fog—illuminating as it fades, revealing even as it withdraws. Between dreaming and waking, the ghost delineates an uncertain threshold of being: images dissolve, and time folds upon itself. The exhibition unfolds between London and New York, one city manifesting through mist, the other drifting in light. Through moving image, sound, and installation, the artists summon the dreamlike resonance of memory, constructing spaces where reality and illusion echo one another. Within these invocations of light and shadow, each work becomes a séance of perception, an attempt to grasp what is already vanishing.
Losing Ghosts is not about death, but about the living traces that continue to reverberate. It calls forth those memories that flicker between breaths, belonging neither to history nor to the present, but to that floating interval where we dream. The ghost thus becomes a figure of temporal deferral, a fold of time and an echo of perception, allowing memory to continue glowing within disappearance.
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