Unfinished is not the same as abandoned is an exhibition chapter of Ageless, Ageless, Shimmer’s expansive multi-year study of cultural phenomena that connect us across time and space.

In response to the context of STORAGE, Bangkok, an art space in a former printing house that specialised in Buddhist texts, the exhibition begins with “Untitled”, 1991, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. This work enacts rhythm, multiplicity, and the dispersal of material into the world. We are drawn to the paper stack because of its shifting, changing mass, as well as Gonzalez-Torres’s instruction to choose a blue. He once said, “For me, if a beautiful memory could have a color, that color would be light blue.”

For some time, we pondered why blue, what makes it a beautiful memory? Then we were reminded of Melvin Moti’s work Miamilism, from 2010. A faded and framed LIFE magazine cover from July 1967, featuring Mia Farrow, has been intentionally exposed to sunlight by the artist. The ink of the headlines, which refer to Cold War power, revolutionary violence, psychedelic perception, and body ritual, has faded into the background, leaving only the cyan of Farrow’s eyes piercing through space. We are inspired by the idea that, in a life of transience, uncertainty, and impermanence, we can rely on beautiful memories to inform the future.

We are not only concerned with Mia’s eyes themselves, but with the cyan ink, which relies on a negative trace to appear on the surface of the paper. That trace, that tired surface, here today, slowly gone tomorrow.

Gone tomorrow is deeply embedded in Jochen Lempert’s work. Presented here are two images, both featuring what appear to be two bicycles photographed 15 years apart. Small beetles cluster on a gear shifter; in the other image, a lepidopteran in flight centres itself in the frame. Seasonality shifts us into movement. As you might remember, the flight of a lepidopteran is an invitation for us, as children, to chase and leap up high. Schmetterling! ผีเสื้อ! Butterfly! With giggles that fall back into nature, and into that space at STORAGE too, where the windows are left open and Bangkok comes in: her bugs, her emeralds, rubies, sapphires, her polished beetles as lures for us to move outwards, over borders, into both memory and future.

All the works in this show are in precarious states of change. Unfinished is not the same as abandoned. Unfinished means we are bound into a relationship with change. “Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,” Rilke told us. “The non-being inside you allows you to vibrate, in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.” That blue memory, the last hue to fade, that invitation to move.