GALLERY ETHER is thrilled to announce Memory is a Garden, a new solo-exhibition and immersive installation experience by 2022 Tama Art University graduate and Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2022 recipient Nelson Hor, to be held from Saturday, December 3rd through Friday, December 30th.

Tokyo based Malaysian artist Nelson Hor (born 1998, Penang) has explored a variety of mediums in order to find the perfect tools for expressing his voice as an artist, ultimately settling on mineral pigments. Believing that these pigments are like a primal link between humanity and nature, as ancient people used them to paint murals to convey messages and record incidents throughout time, he seeks to use them to document issues related to modern society, such as mental health and discrimination against LGBTQ people.

In Memory is a Garden, Hor expands on the Japanese idiom “not seeing is a flower”, which is used to express the sentiment that because what is real can never be as good as what is imagined, prospect is often better than possession. However, it’s only through the possession of experience and memory that we are able to cobble information and evidence together into prospects and predictions for the future. Memory, as a way of reliving past experiences and creating our sense of time and space, is rather unreliable. It is often warped, manipulated, or simply fabricated by our emotions, traumatic experiences, and other factors. Hor finds himself fascinated by the idea that our existence as humans is built on these inaccurate and flexible memories. In this exhibition he presents us with a body of work within the context of a fully immersive installation, creating a space for viewers to experience how external factors can easily alter our memories, and demonstrating how parts of our brain communicate with each other as if in a room where sounds are constantly coming from other corners of the house. If not seeing is a flower, memory is a garden.