Jocelyn Lui Debuts ‘The Past is the Future’ Love Journey

 From 4 to 10 December 2025, multidisciplinary visual artist Jocelyn Hoi-Yi Lui will present her solo installation exhibition The Past is the Future at the Fringe Club. The exhibition begins with a question sparked by light: As memory fades with time, how do we reconstruct the warmth of what once was?

Known for her immersive installations, Lui explores the threshold between memory, loss, and transformation, turning personal narratives into emotional landscapes with universal resonance. Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s Cultural Exchange Grant, this exhibition continues her deep inquiry into the interplay of memory, material, and metaphor. Drawing from her background in textile design and contemporary photography, Lui has developed a distinctive artistic language that embraces creation as a healing practice—tracing a journey from loss to renewal.

At the heart of The Past is the Future lies the metaphor of the sun: a symbol of enduring familial love, yet also a natural phenomenon subject to obscuration—hidden behind clouds, vanishing in storms. This duality reflects the fragility of human connection and invites reflection on how the presence or absence of love shapes our being.

The recurring motif of “11,640 hours” is not a cold measure of time, but an emotional metric that quietly woven into the space, bearing witness to how fleeting moments crystallize into eternity.

Within a four-meter-wide circular mesh installation, warm light gently envelops the viewer. The fabric sways with the air, forming a breathing field of memory. Handmade ceramic plates carry a dual ritual: clay begins as unconditionally malleable, then undergoes the fire’s trial to become fixed—like the self-forged in love. Photographic images developed in the darkroom seep into the ceramic surface like traces of sweat, becoming fragile yet enduring imprints of existence.

Lui sees photography as a metabolic process, like photosynthesis, transforming light into living artistic presence. Through meditative darkroom techniques and ceramic practice, she creates vessels that embody her core belief: clay, like the self, begins soft and shapeless, but is irrevocably formed through fire. The developed surface becomes a rewritten identity—fixed yet vulnerable, lasting yet delicate.

The Past is the Future is more than an exhibition; it is an embodied proposition: identity is not innate but continually shaped through the interweaving of love and memory. The artist invites audience to pause and feel the light flowing through mesh, memory settling into clay, and love quietly sculpting each present moment.