Cecilia Chuan Jiang opened her debut solo exhibition Where Light is Stored on 11th August at The Crypt Gallery in London, curated by Wenqi Zhang and presented by Which Witch Collective.
The exhibition brings together interactive city models, animation, painting, digital works, visual archives and participatory elements drawn from Cecilia’s experiences of living across seven cities.
Born in southern China and now based in the UK, Cecilia works across animation, interactive media and installation. Her work is rooted in the places she has lived and the details she remembers from them. A streetlight, a lake, a supermarket, the shadow of a summer tree, a particular colour or sound can become a starting point for thinking about what remains of a place after we have left.
Speaking about the starting point for the exhibition, Cecilia says: “I am interested in the things that we don’t consciously decide to remember, the colours, sounds and small moments that somehow stay with us. After living in different cities, I began to realise that I was carrying fragments of each place with me. This exhibition is an attempt to bring those fragments together and to ask what a city becomes when it exists in memory.”
This idea runs through Where Light is Stored, where personal memories appear as paintings, moving images, digital works and interactive models. At the centre of the exhibition is Portable Cities, a project that brings together Cecilia’s memories of the seven cities she has lived in. The cities are recalled through personal associations rather than conventional maps, allowing childhood memories, colours, sounds and everyday encounters to sit alongside one another.
For curator Wenqi Zhang, Cecilia’s approach also raises questions about how women’s experiences of leaving and belonging are remembered. Wenqi recalls a line Cecilia shared with her during the development of the exhibition: “Nostalgia is a man’s Odyssey; escape is an epic written into women’s bodies.”
For Wenqi, the line became a way of thinking about the different expectations placed on men and women when they leave a place: “It made me think about how differently women can experience leaving, movement and belonging. There is often a romantic idea of migration as a journey towards somewhere else, while women’s experiences can involve a quieter and more continuous process of adapting, leaving and starting again. Cecilia’s work gives these experiences another language, through the places, colours, sounds and memories we carry with us.”
The exhibition is closely shaped by the architecture of The Crypt Gallery. Located under St Pancras New Church, Duke’s Road, London, its stone walls, vaulted passages and underground setting provide a backdrop for Cecilia’s projections, moving images and paintings, with light and colour changing as visitors move through the space.
For the opening, Which Witch Collective specially invited London-based artist Lanyun Huang (Finch) to create a newly commissioned live performance in response to the exhibition. Drawing on Cecilia’s Portable Cities, Lanyun brings together sound, movement, personal recordings, moving images and video game footage from 2023, created between Guangzhou and London. The performance considers how memory and selfhood are carried across different cities and moments when there is no single place to return to, bringing the exhibition’s concerns into a live setting.
Where Light is Stored continues at The Crypt Gallery until 17th August 2026, 12–7 PM.
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