ArtReview | The Top 10 Exhibitions to See in September 2023

Leelee Chan’s sculptures always look a bit like objects that have been dropped by extraterrestrials onto Earth. To be fair, her plastic gridlike, wall-hung sculptures are called things like Cipher (Surface Modular) (2022) and Nocturnal Encounter (2021). So it’s not a giant leap of the imagination. The 2020 BMW Art Journey winner typically makes these out of found plastic pallets, which she cuts into circles, ovals, squares, etc, filling gaps with materials like resin, metals, acrylic and semi precious stones, so that they end up looking like an important part has fallen out of a spacecaft, or some kind of celestial timekeeper, or an intergalactic wayfinding device based on Micronesian stick charts or… There’s combined fragments of Ming dynasty ceramics with metal hardware, woods, plastics and resin; the collective result looking like a diorama of artefacts that ETs might use to educate their offspring about the human species. At Capsule, Chan presents new, larger works, including the freestanding oval-shaped sculpture Lithic Current (2023), which incorporates parts of shipping pallets and looks like it might be an ancient relic of an alien energy generator. Or is it a prehistoric time portal? Spacing out is half the fun.  Fi Churchman