The Pleated Saeculum

"The paintings are a meditation on time: there is the length of the lifetime and lived experience that is conjured and poured into the physical paintings. There is the time it takes for the gypsum to set. And then, the brevity and balance of time as the artist works with distemper, a pigment based in animal skin glue with rapid drying times that necessitate a deftness of hand.

The exhibition’s title pulls from a piece of writing in which Morrison has found resonance, by the author and historian Rebecca Solnit: “There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone.”

- excerpt from press release by Jennifer S. Li for the solo exhibition The Pleated Saeculum at Oolong Gallery, September 27 - November 3, 2025

Jennifer S. Li is an art advisor and writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing appears regularly in publications such as Art in America, Frieze, ArtAsiaPacific, Sight Unseen, Architectural Digest, and more.