Everything's mine though just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Travel Elegy - Wisława Szymborska

Recent works of Huang Zan-Lun, such as portraits of people (or things), motherboards of others and the sealed hidden past, are all linked with the mnemonics from the past to present. Further looking up the book " Huang Zan-Lun Collection of Settings" published by the artist, his essays from some past days can also be found compiled into the collection. These memories remain in paintings, installations or collections, linking the artist's past footprints one by one. Huang Zan-Lun takes out objects, portraits, and motherboards and then seals them up. He constantly endows objects with a temporal continuity by shaping, covering, and reorganizing. At the same time, we can also perceive from these manifestations and publications that some fragments of Huang Zan-Lun 's private, opening outward memory are vaguely unveiled. What we get is that, like the world seen from the doorhole, scrappily possessing the clues from peeping in the assembly of things.

When "things" become a means of sealing memory in the artist's creation, shifting the display from private realm to public spaces, it is like the historical process of self-owned "cabinet of curiosities" turning to the public "museums". Therefore, the exhibition "The Promise of Things" is an assembly of creation "things" as if treasuring, collecting, remaining, and dropping by Huang Zan-Lun during his art-making journey.

In Szymborska's "Travel Elegy", everything is mine when coming into my sight, but returns to the public when the sight has gone. Things were originally private, such as the cabinet of curiosities of the noble and the taxidermy room of the scholar, etc. However, when the museum gradually postures itself to build the eyes of the empire, develop a taste and open to the public to visit, the ownership of “things” changed from me to everyone.

The light in the museum projects on the object like a searchlight that silhouettes the frame of the object between light and shadow. The prototype of the museum is a collection of things, then discipline and memory. The “things” seen at a glance expand the space, mess up the lines, are named, deformed, and placed in a specific position to produce meaning, both public and private. As to the display of things in the museum, it has become the combat of memories one after another unfolding in private eyes and public spaces.

The exhibition "The Promise of Things" is an aggregate connecting the recent works of Huang Zan-Lun, constructing a new identification of the relationship between creation and "things". Through the dialogue with memory during his creation, he contemplates the meaning of being disturbed both under the private collection and public’s gaze, as well as under the reshaping of the relationship between things and people, things and creators. (Texts/ Ho Yu-Kuan)