Exhibition · Goethe-Institut Hong Kong · Hong Kong
Participating Artist Chilai Howard Curator Isaac Leung Opening hours of the Goethe-Gallery and Black Box Studio: 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM (Mon - Fri) 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM (Sat) Closed on Sundays and Public Holidays Exhibition opens on September 7, 2026 (Mon) at 6:30 PM in the presence of the curator and artist. He wants to erase, but he archives. He wants to let go, but he preserves. He covers the object's history, but monumentalises its form. He questions memory, but constructs a self-portrait from it. A Self-Portrait: The Process of Erasing presents Chilai Howard’s solo exhibition as both a personal journey and an inquiry into what constitutes memory, objects, and the self. At its core lies a paradox: to let go of a memory, one must first give it a final form, while recognising the impossibility of ever possessing the past itself. The artist deliberately metallises objects associated with different stages of his life. Through metallisation, fluid memories are given a rigid, continuous surface. Memories, regrets, attachments, and pain appear preserved, made durable, even monumentalised, while traces of lived experience disappear beneath the same metallic skin. The process simultaneously preserves and erases, taking on an almost ritualistic function. Rather than destroying the objects, he withdraws them from their ordinary functions, seals their former surfaces, and transforms them into something closer to relics. The object remains, but something of its former life has also been concealed. Yet the exhibition asks: are objects themselves memories, and can memory ever truly be preserved or erased? No matter how precisely the artist narrates, preserves, or remembers it, the past itself cannot be recovered. Metallisation cannot repair this absence; instead, it marks it. The exhibition therefore becomes an archive not of what can be recovered, but one constructed around what can no longer be recovered. What remains is a hardened surface formed around an absence. Paradoxically,…