Through July 3, 2026

Stan Chan’s “Hidden Treasures” features fourteen ornate works composed of collaged paper ephemera, such as receipts, advertisements, wrappers and more. These collages are paired with wooden boxes that hold everyday objects arranged and sealed behind Plexiglas, often with an intermediary layer of wire caging or chicken wire. Both paper collages and Plexiglas cabinets bear the artist’s slanted wax crayon cursive inscriptions interrupted by his drawings of everyday objects, such as sieves, jars, whisks, and potatoes. Although the overall impression is one of a diaristic cabinet of curiosities, no single element is a focal point. Rather, the works convey the sense of a life having been lived and governed by the rhythmic cadence of handwriting and the subjective experience it describes.

Two framed artist statements provide origin stories. The first mentions the Victorian house in East Oakland where Chan grew up. “I have made a series of small wall sections inspired by my mother’s house,” Chan writes, pointing to the boxed Plexiglas works. “A generation later, I’ve seen the bigger world, but in my dreams, in my memory, my mother’s house and the yard that surrounds it is still home.” These Plexiglas cabinets thus call up the specter of Chan’s childhood home, long since passed from the family’s ownership, into the room. 

A second statement, similarly signed and likely associated with the collages, mentions an article in which a man living in a shack in the now-ghost town of Locke, “a Chinese community in California,” papered his walls with newspapers for insulation against the cold.  “I have been collecting papers from my mother’s house in East Oakland from the recycle bin, my vacations in Asia, and from my wife’s and son’s trips, and on the streets while going back and forth from work,” Chan writes. “I’ve glued the bits and pieces together and drawn on them.” In this way, Chan suggests that the collages add insulation to the space and reduce its porosity. These two statements, echoed in the pairing of cabinets and collages, lend a breathy psychological valence to the room, inviting us to look through and beyond the window-like boxes while feeling how the collages potentially stop those gaps in memory, gaps that might otherwise draw a chill.

Nevertheless, legibility is not Chan’s priority. Although it’s a unifying aesthetic throughout the exhibit, Chan’s writing slips in and out of readability. The objects contained in the cabinets are not fully visible, and the collaged elements do not readily convey their source or context. Even the titles are not clearly linked to specific works. One has to guess. Chan makes the guessing relatively likely by naming works after dominant features. The effort and doubt required to connect these dots shape a philosophical argument about the elusiveness of memory and the unifying hand as it records its experience. Indeed, it is as though each object signifies first and foremost the process of remembering, earmarking what has been remembered.

“Slip on Shoes” includes two collaged panels with a box placed between them. The collaged panel includes three birds-eye sketches of shoes, arranged as one might set house shoes by the front door. “I own an old Victorian House,” the handwritten text begins, before growing at least semi-obscured by what might be a biscuit wrapper. The constant interruption of materials is another effective comment on memory and its capacity to provide and prevent access to the past. “Latch and Keys,” the wood-and-Plexiglas box beneath this collage, is set with a series of hinges protruding from its top, along with a similar number of keys hanging from beaded chains. The box, meanwhile, is filled with buttons, a belt buckle, and small, paper-printed firecracker sleeves. A latch drawn on the surface interrupts the otherwise consistent handwriting. 

A second collage beneath this box, “Julie’s Fish,” features wrappers and receipts, and a number of images of a horse, a cat, M&M characters, crocs and a printed fish that previously appeared on consumer packaging. Chan describes these allusive and elusive works as “forgettable stories,” furthering the message that, unlike the original purpose behind cabinets of curiosity, these objects, renderings, and tales are not presented in the interest of complete transmission. They amount to placeholders, signifying a no-longer-accessible time from Chan’s past, a place being conjured in the minds of viewers. The gallery thus inspires a sympathetic sensation by which we reach for the artist’s memories.

Two collages hang above a central pair of Plexiglas cabinets in “Set 1.” The top one, titled “Pickle Jars,” includes striking drawings of cards and mason jars. The accompanying cabinet, “Whistles and Tong,” is full of broad, plastic noodle spoons, pencils, a whistle and lightbulbs, with a drawing of tongs on the surface. Keys hang from the bottom of the cabinet, and hinges protrude from the top. “A couple of days before the fourth of July, Mickey, the neighbor’s cat, sauntered through a gap in the fence …” A wax-crayon line through the center of the box demarcates Mickey’s story from a separate narrative about the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive. Underneath this, a second box, “Strainer and Pot,” is painted lavender blue and filled with bottle caps. Cabinet knobs are affixed to its top surface. A second collage beneath this includes found cards, transportation stubs, a cat, a red envelope for the lunar new year, and a sriracha ramen packet. Drawings of persimmons and onions decorate the surface, interrupting the stream of writing.

When so much of the minutia of life is documented to excess, transcribed in standardized non-seraph fonts, and posted to social media platforms where packaging is only ever digital, the true weight of a given memory or experience is easily lost. It’s rendered stale by the next ten posts, or by the capacity to look up one’s childhood residence online for interior views. In the case of “Hidden Treasures,” Chan calls attention to other exercises for remembering and the ways in which his installation performs that instructional role. Upon stepping into the main gallery, we notice that the floors are clad in cardboard that has been expertly peeled to mimic the pattern of wood grain. Thus we see the shape of memory through the cast-off materials of daily life, its trash and its sentimental objects, scenes through which the lives of families pass in Chan’s well-choreographed treasure trove of memory.