On entering RETURN 02 in Glasgow, the first thing that struck me was the distance between the works, and between the works and their viewers.

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The gallery itself was not large. Paintings, glass works, moving images, installations, and digital pieces appeared together across white walls, wooden floors, and several interconnected rooms. Some visitors held the exhibition booklet close as they examined smaller works; others paused before moving images; still others changed their route because a group had gathered ahead. Viewers’ bodies continually entered the spaces between works and, in doing so, altered the viewing distance available to others.

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This slightly compressed setting helped me understand why RETURN 02 approaches culture through individual experience.

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RETURN is an ongoing curatorial project concerned with individual states of being. Where RETURN 01 focused on bodily perception, emotional experience, and the individual’s position within lived reality, RETURN 02 carries the discussion into a cultural context. It asks how individual experience accumulates and changes across different settings, and how language, memory, and everyday life connect it to culture.

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“Culture” can easily become too expansive a term. In this exhibition, however, it first appears through specific experiences: a song once sung by a mother, a piece of traditional textile reassembled, a monsoon, a train door passed through each day, a garment without a body, and an individual’s imagined relation to family, homeland, or the future.

This was also my most direct way into the exhibition.

Fig. 1. Installation view of Return 02, Glasgow, 2026. Photo: Yaney Tang. © Yaney Tang.

Beginning with a Song I Can No Longer Understand

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Brian Castellani’s Displaced Memory perhaps addresses the contradiction within “return” most directly. The work records a video call in which the artist’s mother, who has dementia, sings a Slovak Christmas song. Castellani himself no longer speaks the language.

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Here, “return” confronts a cultural point of origin that is incomplete and still receding. His mother’s memory is disappearing, while language has already been severed between generations. Her singing allows the past to enter the present for a moment, but it cannot restore what has been lost. Displaced Memory is closer to an attempt to draw near once more before more disappears.

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Other works continue to shift the meaning of return. Herbert Neuwirth’s Banned Straitutu places restricted and politicised words on a straitjacket, bringing language into direct relation with the body, control, and expression. Esha Malik’s Revolutio, Symbiosis, and Baluch use digital processing to reconfigure mythological imagery, traditional South Asian visual structures, and contemporary urban materials, exploring the continuity and transformation of cultural memory across different contexts.

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In Baluch, the compositional order of traditional textiles remains recognisable, but fragments of North London’s street environment have been inserted into it. Tradition continues to change through migration, absorbing new urban experiences and acquiring new content and meaning.

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Claudia Ungersbäck’s INTER extends this transformation to a canonical text. Through moving image, shadow, and digital media, she reworks Antonin Artaud’s radio play. Return no longer means restoration, but reinterpretation after the work has passed through personal experience and contemporary media.

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These pieces led me to reconsider what “RETURN” might mean. When memory, language, and living environments have already changed, does facing the past again also mean understanding it anew?

Fig. 2. Installation view of RETURN 02, Glasgow, 2026. Photo: Yaney Tang. © Yaney Tang.

Fig. 3. Installation view of RETURN 02, Glasgow, 2026. Photo: Yaney Tang. © Yaney Tang.

How Is a Place Remembered?

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Another clear thread in the exhibition concerns the relationship between people and place.

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RETURN 02 does not approach place through the most readily recognisable cultural symbols. Instead, weather, commuting, and everyday habits become ways for artists to draw near to a place again. They show how place can become an experience registered by the body and repeated through daily life.

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Clare Schouten’s Rain 13 presents Singapore through the colours, humidity, and sensations associated with the monsoon. After leaving, she continued to remember the weather, sounds, and bodily impressions of the city.

Josie Johnson’s I Think I Missed You locates private memory within Glasgow’s most ordinary commuting scenes. ScotRail train doors and Glasgow Subway doors are urban fixtures encountered each day, but when connected to the artist’s reflections on a sister from whom she has lost contact, on distance, and on an imagined reunion, the city begins to carry an emotional charge. The opening and closing of the doors is both an everyday action and a sign of departure, arrival, and missed encounters.

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Hengtai Zhang’s Twilight Over the Silent Hill expands the question to the long-term relationship between people and their environment. The moving-image work places the labour and rituals of local ethnic minority communities within changes in landscape and season, revealing how the natural environment shapes the rhythms of life and cultural practice.

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Together, the three works offer distinct senses of place, making return in RETURN 02 more complex. Each inscribes place into the body. “Where” is no longer merely a geographical coordinate; it may be a rainstorm, a route travelled every day, or a way of life the body has already learned.

Fig. 5. Installation view of RETURN 02, Glasgow, 2026. Photo: Liatris Bian. © Liatris Bian.

When Space Begins to Participate in the Work

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The RETURN 02 exhibition occupied several interconnected areas. The limited floor space compressed the distance between works, frequently bringing different media and scales into the same field of vision. This density directly shaped how viewers understood the relationships among the works.

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Jiawei Yu’s Deer Pelvis, Wig, Cement is a particularly clear example. Installed in a corner of the building, the work’s position intensified its sense of marginality and transition. A deer pelvis, wig, cement, and metal rod formed a body that resisted stable placement, while the corner made its instability more palpable. The installation translated “position” into an embodied condition.

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The same space, however, did not support every work equally well.

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Sofia On’s Ghost and Monika Tkaczyk’s four glass works, After the Storm, I Root Again, Between Worlds, I Stand, Court of Silent Masks, and Eclipse of Remembrance, all required close viewing. Tkaczyk’s works in particular changed with light, reflection, and viewing angle. As people continually passed and paused, these small-scale pieces were easily obscured, and the time available to remain with them was shortened.

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This exposed a contradiction in the spatial narrative of RETURN 02.

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On the one hand, the compact installation continually placed works by different artists within one another’s visual field. It was difficult to face a single work in isolation: neighbouring paintings, glass, moving images, and other viewers’ bodies were always present at the same time. This dense spatial relationship formed an intriguing correspondence with the exhibition’s emphasis on “individual experience”. Private memories and cultural experiences belonging to different artists met in the same space, allowing viewers to perceive connections between them.

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Visual proximity, however, does not automatically amount to a curatorial relationship.

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The thirteen artists differed substantially in medium, scale, and creative background. Spatial juxtaposition alone was not enough to make every relationship among the works legible. Some adjacencies generated new interpretations, while others required viewers to consult the booklet and wall texts before they could understand the connections the curators sought to establish.

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A spatial narrative can build layers through the distance between works, through light and sound, and through transitions from one room to another, while still preserving an open viewing route.

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The venue’s constraints were clearly visible. Limited space forced the works close together and made particular curatorial decisions more legible: which works should be adjacent, which required greater distance, and how viewers would move among them.

Text by: Ruimin Fu