上海外滩美术馆 Rockbund Art Museum

“武雨濛：来自未归还的灵灯”是艺术家的首场机构个展，以同题的大型特定场域委约作品为核心，汇集其过去十余年创作的重要作品。武雨濛出生在北京、生长在香港，现驻纽约，曾就读于香港城市大学“批判性跨媒体实验室”。她的艺术实验根植于对电影和绘画媒介的持续探索，作品跳脱传统叙事结构，通过影像生成装置最基本的对立要素——光与影、反射与折射、不透明性与痕迹——重新思考电影媒介的可能。展览从美术馆三楼延伸至东侧楼梯间，艺术家的思考以混合的形式展开，游走在电影、绘画、建筑、扫描素材和影子之间。其中，手工制作的纸灯笼贯穿始终，作为发光的脆弱容器，承载关于记忆、抹除和归还的凝思。

武雨濛的实践延承多位实验媒介艺术家和理论家的脉络，其中尤以车学庆（1951—1982）为重。受其影响，武雨濛的创作牵涉离散意识、断裂的时间性和缅怀的伦理维度，构造开放的结构并刻意保留未决的状态，容许流离之物悄然浮现。她关注游移在消逝和在场之间的事物，由此探索脆弱材料与旧时技术。

这种对消逝和归还的细腻觉察，引导武雨濛在 2019 年的作品《庾文翰未完成的归途》中运用纸灯笼这种媒介。影片重访香港回归后的一起悬而未决的男孩失踪案。在项目调研期间，艺术家在当地市场发现了一只手工灯笼，进而开始探究其形式和象征维度的潜能。在她看来，纸灯笼就像宝来克斯相机——尺寸小巧，却充满历史和形而上学意涵。

展览的核心是《来自未归还的灵灯》（2025）系列，一组占据美术馆东侧楼梯间的新委任特定场域装置作品。美术馆大楼最初为皇家亚洲文会，建于 1933 年，在 1970 年代另作它用，存放被查抄的书籍。武雨濛运用竹材和传统上用于珍本修复的保护级手工纸，制作图书造型的灯笼，重新激活这段被遗忘的过往。“书灯”沿楼道窗户陈列，呼应曾经捆扎在此的图书。作品象征着一场“魂归”——图书以闪烁飘渺的形式回访这栋建筑，仿佛等待被重新阅读。黄昏时分，灯笼散发光芒，内外皆明，整座楼梯间化作垂直滚动的胶片。即便在美术馆闭馆后，这些脆弱的载体依然可以从虎丘路望见，为不可言明与尚未归还之物留守，一度沉默的故事在微光下重现。

全球的历史和文化都正在遭受争夺、抹除和重写。在这个时代，“武雨濛：来自未归还的灵灯”敞开空间迎候一种不必作决断的缅怀，循着遗落的痕迹悄然提醒我们：我们并不需要遗忘。

Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, bringing together key works from the past decade and centering on a new large-scale, site-specific commission of the same name. Born in Beijing, raised in Hong Kong, and currently based in New York, Wu’s experimental practice is grounded in a deep and evolving engagement with cinema and drawing. Trained at the Critical Intermedia Laboratory at the City University of Hong Kong, her work departs from conventional narrative structures and reconsiders the cinematic apparatus through its most elemental oppositions: light and shadow, reflection and refraction, opacity and trace. Spanning the museum’s third floor and the East Staircase, these concerns unfold across hybrid forms that move between film, drawing, architecture, scanned ephemera, and shadow. Among them, handmade paper lanterns recur throughout the exhibition, serving as fragile, luminous vessels for reflecting on memory, erasure, and return.

Wu’s work draws on a lineage of experimental media artists and theorists, most notably Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), whose practice shapes Wu’s engagement with diasporic consciousness, fractured temporalities, and the ethical dimensions of remembrance. Like Cha, Wu constructs open-ended forms that remain deliberately unresolved, creating space for what has been displaced to quietly surface. Her use of fragile materials and outdated technologies reflects sustained attention to what slips between presence and disappearance.

This interest in disappearance and return led Wu to begin working with paper lanterns in 2019, during the development of her film Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon, which revisits the unresolved disappearance of a boy in post-handover Hong Kong. While researching the project, she encountered a handmade lantern in a local market and began to explore its formal and symbolic potential. In Wu’s practice, the paper lantern functions like a Bolex camera: modest in scale but expansive in historical and metaphysical reach.

Central to the exhibition is Lanterns from the Unreturned (2025), a newly commissioned site-specific installation occupying the museum’s East Staircase. Originally built in 1933 for the Royal Asiatic Society, the building was repurposed in the 1970s to store confiscated books during the Cultural Revolution. Wu reanimates this forgotten history through arrangements of lanterns in book form, handcrafted from bamboo and conservation-grade paper traditionally used in rare book restoration. These sculptures line the staircase’s windows and interior, echoing the bundled books that once filled the space. The installation imagines a spectral return, volumes drifting back into the building as flickering presences, alive with the possibility of being read once more. At dusk, the lanterns begin to glow, casting inward and outward light, illuminating the museum’s East Staircase like a vertical scroll. Visible from Huqiu Road even after the museum's operation hours, these fragile vessels hold space for the unspoken and the unreturned, allowing stories once silenced to shimmer faintly back into view.

At a time when history and culture are being contested, erased, and rewritten across the world, Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned creates a space for remembering without resolution, following the traces that remain and offering a quiet reminder that we do not need to forget.