“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I: Swann’s Way. 1913

Memory is rarely a precise record of the past; rather, it is a creative act of reconstruction. This understanding of memory’s fluid nature is a hallmark of Marcel Proust’s writing, the source of the exhibition’s title and frequent inspiration for artist Won Ju Lim. In the literary world of Proust–the celebrated French author and critic who was active in the early 20th century–the act of remembering causes time and space to slip and overlap. Lim’s work translates this interior experience into physical space. Lim maps the shifting boundaries of the recollected and the imagined through multi-sensory installations composed of sculptural, painterly, and audio-visual media fragments.

Won Ju Lim: The Vast Structure of Recollection brings together three chapters of Lim’s artistic practice. The exhibition includes Proustian Bedrooms, A Sense of Complexity…, and a new site-specific installation. In Proustian Bedrooms, Lim retraces the dimensions and arrangements of her previous bedrooms entirely from memory. By superimposing different rooms onto one another, the installation creates a layered history of domestic space that spans the surfaces of the Coil Atrium at the Culver Center of the Arts. A Sense of Complexity…, another Proust-related project, combines found objects with architectural models to create an environment of shifting light and shadow. Created especially for this exhibition, a new installation investigates the physical and spectral traces of the gallery itself–a former turn-of-the-century Rouse’s department store–exploring the museum site as a repository for residues of the past.

Won Ju Lim: The Vast Structure of Recollection is curated by Nikolay Maslov, Curator of Special Projects at UCR ARTS. This exhibition is supported in part by the Voy and Fay Wong Family Endowment. Exhibitions at UCR ARTS are supported by the City of Riverside.

Image: Won Ju Lim, A Sense of Complexity…, 2025 (detail). Photo by Nik Massey.