Nostalgia
- Diamond Zhou
- Jan 3
- 14 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
January 3rd, 2026
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots: νόστος, nóstos, meaning return home and ἄλγος, álgos, meaning longing. Nostalgia is not a longing for the past as it was, but an encounter with the past as it is remembered, reshaped, and carried forward, altered by time and distance in ways that cannot be undone. Nostalgia tells the truth about what we keep reaching for, and what we keep failing to retrieve. Writer Svetlana Boym famously refuses the cheap version of nostalgia as a simple longing for what was. She defines it, more precisely and more dangerously, as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,” a feeling that is at once loss and romance, displacement and self-authored myth. She calls nostalgia a kind of double exposure, a superimposition of “home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life,” and when we try to force it into one image, it breaks the frame. That failure to settle into a single, stable picture is not a flaw. It is the point.
Boym’s makes distinctions between two tendencies: restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia insists on rebuilding the lost home; it takes itself seriously, confuses memory with truth, and often recruits identity, tradition, and even nationalism as scaffolding. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing,” stays with contradiction, delays the homecoming, and can even be ironic, tender, and lucid at once. If restorative nostalgia is architecture, reflective nostalgia is a room with the windows open: you can live there, but you cannot lock it down.
Art, at its best, is an education in reflective nostalgia. It does not simply retrieve the past. It asks what kind of past we are trying to retrieve, why we are tempted to edit it into something cleaner, and what responsibilities accompany the act of remembering. Memory is never simply a room you walk back into, dusting off the furniture. It is a force that edits as it preserves, and it often works with a strange, forward pressure: what we choose to keep, what we cannot bear to keep, and what we let vanish quietly shape the kinds of feeling we will be capable of later. That is why the best artworks about nostalgia rarely behave like sentimental time travel. They are more like triggers and thresholds, operating through restraint, repetition, and omission, because memory does not arrive as a full report. It arrives as a temperature shift, a scent, a detail that suddenly turns the present porous.
Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes, painted obsessively across decades, are often described as quiet, but that word can mislead. They are not quiet because they lack feeling. They are quiet because they refuse melodrama. His bottles, jars, and boxes sit like a small congregation, repeated and rearranged, lit with an attention so steady it begins to feel moral. In Morandi, memory is not the dramatic return of a lost world, rather it is the decision to return to the same world, again and again, and to find it inexhaustible.
This is nostalgia stripped of its obvious romance. There is no picturesque childhood, no heroic homeland, no sentimental prop. There is only the humble insistence that time can deepen rather than merely pass. Morandi’s repetition behaves like prayer where the point is not novelty, but presence. The longer you stay with these paintings, the more you sense that the “past” they hold is not an event, but a practice. They model a kind of reflective nostalgia that does not ask to rebuild anything; it asks to see what is already here, more truthfully, more patiently, until the familiar becomes strange again.
Morandi offers a particularly New Year kind of lesson. The new year tempts us with reinvention, with the fantasy of clean breaks, but the deeper transformations in life often come through repetition, through returning to what you thought you understood and discovering that you did not. Morandi’s art gives dignity to the slow accumulation of perception. He suggests that memory is not always a story you tell yourself, sometimes it is the shape of your attention over time.
Vilhelm Hammershøi’s interiors feel like withheld letters. His rooms are not merely domestic spaces; they are mnemonic architectures, rooms built out of absence, restraint, and a kind of pale patience. Doors open onto other doors. Light arrives without announcement. Figures, when present, are often turned away, as if the act of remembering requires privacy. These paintings do not illustrate a specific memory so much as they recreate the conditions under which memory happens: solitude, repetition, the subtle tyranny of familiar walls.
Hammershøi’s restraint is not emptiness, it is tension. The quietness is charged. It asks the viewer to supply what is missing, and that supply is where memory enters. The room becomes a screen for projection, but not in a shallow way. It becomes a test: what do you bring into a space when the space refuses to entertain you?
Edward Hopper, though different in atmosphere and era, shares a related power. Hopper’s rooms, diners, windows, and hotel interiors often feel like still frames from a narrative that has already happened or is about to happen, and the viewer is left standing in the doorway of that suspended moment. In Hopper, nostalgia can appear as loneliness, but it can also appear as clarity, the strange clarity of seeing life from a slight distance. His paintings can feel like memory after the emotion has cooled, when what remains is structure: a chair, a lamp, the angle of light on a wall, the knowledge that someone was there and is not there now.
Hopper’s relevance to nostalgia is not that he paints “the past.” It is that he paints time as a kind of interior weather. The viewer often experiences a mild ache, not because the scene is tragic, but because it is incomplete. The incompleteness invites the mind to finish it, and the mind finishes with the materials it already has, namely its own memories, its own losses, its own private archives.
Robert Young’s sustained painting of the interior of his home, pursued over years, is not merely a documentary project; it is an argument about what it means to stay. A home recorded repeatedly becomes less a backdrop and more a witness. The walls do not just contain a life; they absorb it. In such work, nostalgia is not a postcard, it is a long exposure. The past is not retrieved in a single burst of feeling, it is sedimented slowly through attention. The New Year, in that sense, is not a new chapter, it is just another layer.
Gerhard Richter’s photo-based paintings are among the sharpest critiques of nostalgia as certainty. By translating photographs into paint and then blurring them, Richter makes a visual claim that feels almost psychological: clarity is not always honest. Memory is unstable, and sometimes the most ethical way to paint the past is to refuse to polish it into something crisp, consumable, or emotionally efficient.
The blur is not merely style. It is an admission of the limits of recollection, and perhaps even a refusal of voyeurism. Many people want the past to be vivid because vividness feels like ownership. Richter denies that ownership. He lets the image hover between recognition and loss, which is exactly where memory actually lives.
Marlene Dumas, in a different register, also refuses the fantasy of clean memory. Her figures can feel as if they are surfacing from the murk of collective image culture, press photos, private snapshots, art historical ghosts, and personal grief. Dumas understands that the images we inherit are never neutral. They arrive stained with context, power, desire, fear. In her work, memory is not simply what happened. Memory is what the image does to you now.
What Dumas and Richter share is a resistance to restorative nostalgia. Neither artist offers the comforting reconstruction of a lost home. Instead, they offer the strange, bracing honesty of partial access. If there is poignancy here, it is not the poignancy of a sentimental return. It is the poignancy of recognising that the past is not fully available, and that our attempts to make it fully available can become another kind of violence.
Anselm Kiefer brings a different gravity to nostalgia and memory, one that is particularly important in any serious discussion of the subject. Kiefer’s work insists that memory is not always tender. It can be unbearable. It can be contaminated. It can be political, collective, inherited, and morally fraught. If restorative nostalgia tries to rebuild an ideal home, Kiefer shows what happens when the home itself is implicated in ruin.
His material language, ash, lead, straw, thickened surfaces that feel like scorched earth, suggests that remembrance can be a labour, not a reverie. In such work, the viewer is not invited to indulge in longing. The viewer is asked to reckon. This is where nostalgia’s danger becomes visible. The desire to return, to purify, to simplify, can quickly become a refusal to face what actually happened.
Nostalgia can be a perfume, but it can also be propaganda. To speak about nostalgia responsibly in 2026 means acknowledging how easily longing can be recruited by ideologies that promise a return to origins. Boym’s warning about the seductions of rebuilding the “ideal home” is not abstract. It is a description of a recurring historical pattern. Kiefer, among others, makes that pattern palpable.
If memory is not only personal but collective, then the archive becomes one of its most powerful stages. Christian Boltanski’s installations, often built from photographs, clothing, light bulbs, and archival gestures, deal with the anonymity of collective memory and the ethics of remembrance. Boltanski repeatedly confronts the fact that most lives vanish from the record, and even when they are recorded, the record is fragile, partial, and haunted.
Boltanski’s work does not give us the past as a narrative. It gives us the past as an atmosphere, a field of traces. It is the opposite of restorative nostalgia. There is no reconstruction, only the ache of what cannot be fully recovered. And yet, there is care. The archive, in Boltanski, becomes an act of mourning and an act of attention, as if to say: I cannot bring you back, but I can refuse to let you disappear without witness.
Hiroshi Sugimoto approaches time through a different paradox. In his Theaters series, a film projected over time collapses into a single, glowing white rectangle, a blank screen that contains an entire duration. His seascapes, too, compress time into an image that feels both ancient and immediate. Sugimoto’s photographs turn nostalgia into something almost cosmic: not longing for a particular past, but the recognition that time itself is too large to hold, and yet we keep trying, with images, with rituals, with art.
Rachel Whiteread’s casts of negative space make absence physical. A room becomes a solid. An interior becomes a block. The space where life happened is turned into an object you can circle, as if memory has stepped out of the mind and into the world. Whiteread’s genius is that she makes the invisible architecture of daily life visible: the air we lived inside, the spaces we never thought to notice until they were gone.
This is nostalgia without ornament. It is not longing for a prettier past. It is a confrontation with the reality that our lives are shaped by spaces that will not stay, and that what vanishes is often what held us most intimately.
Do Ho Suh’s translucent fabric architectures, his recreations of homes and corridors, make the idea of “home that no longer exists” feel almost literal. You can walk through a structure that is there and not there, visible and permeable, an outline of belonging. In Suh, nostalgia is not a desire to return so much as a desire to carry. Home becomes portable, and portability becomes both solution and sorrow. The structure can travel, but can the feeling?
Song Dong’s Waste Not is one of the most emotionally intelligent works about memory and material culture in contemporary art, precisely because it does not moralise in a simplistic way. Song Dong arranges thousands of the domestic things his mother Zhao Xiangyuan kept, not precious heirlooms so much as the humble debris of daily life: toothpaste tubes, bowls, toys, bottle tops, crockery and cutlery, food containers, and even ballpoint pens, laid out with a quiet, relentless order that turns thrift into biography. She also saved practical materials like scraps of fabric for making clothes, and the work lingers on objects whose value is almost entirely emotional, including a bowl of old soap fragments that Song describes as carrying his mother’s love as much as any “use.” It presents the accumulated objects of a life and suddenly the viewer is forced to recognise how memory clings to things, and how things become memory’s prosthetics. In such a work, nostalgia is not a mood. It is a practice of keeping, sometimes tender, sometimes suffocating, often both.
The genius of Waste Not is that it refuses to let the viewer stand outside the subject. Most of us keep things we do not need. Most of us fear waste in some form, whether because of poverty, trauma, migration, war, or simply the knowledge that time is not recoverable. The work becomes a portrait of a relationship to loss. It is also, quietly, a portrait of love, because keeping can be a form of devotion, a way of saying: this mattered, this existed, I will not let it vanish too quickly.
Peter Doig belongs in this conversation because he paints the way memory feels when it is beautiful and untrustworthy at the same time. His landscapes often seem to hover between dream and documentation, between the seductions of colour and the slight unease of not knowing what you are looking at. This is nostalgia as atmosphere, not as argument.
Doig’s paintings can feel like places you have been, even when you have not been there. That is Boym’s definition made visual: longing for a home that may never have existed. The viewer recognises the emotional architecture of the scene without needing the factual location. It is reflective nostalgia at its most painterly, because it does not demand the truth of the past, it lingers in the emotional truth of longing.
The concept of palimpsest belongs to memory because it names the way remembrance actually behaves not as retrieval from a clean vault, but as a lived surface repeatedly worked, revised, covered, and returned to, where earlier inscriptions never quite disappear, they simply become quieter, pressed into the grain. A palimpsest is not an archive that guarantees clarity; it is a field of partial erasures and persistent traces, the kind of record the mind makes when it cannot afford to keep everything yet cannot fully discard what shaped it.
Robert Kelly quite literally constructs paintings through layered accretions, patient build-up of papered and painted layers, an ongoing practice of edit and re-edit where the surface records its own decisions, its hesitations, its revisions, its refinements. He gathers ephemera through travel, old postcards, handwritten letters, stereoscopic slides, antique botanical prints, then collages and works them into geometric arrangements that do not illustrate memory so much as behave like it: the earlier material is not simply displayed, it is partly obscured, pressed under new strata, allowed to show through in fragments and edges, a history that remains legible precisely because it is not fully legible. In that sense, palimpsest is an ethic of making: the past is permitted to persist, but it must coexist with what comes after, and the viewer is asked to feel, rather than solve, the layered condition of time.
In the end, nostalgia is simply love meeting a limit. And not all limits are the same. To eulogise someone who cannot return is to stand before a closed door and admit, with clarity, that love has become memory, and memory has become obligation. There is a finality that, however brutal, can be strangely clean: the world has made a decision you did not choose, and you are left to learn how to honour what was without bargaining for what might still be. But to eulogise someone you chose to part with, while they remain alive somewhere in the world, is a more complicated rite, because the door is not closed, it is simply no longer yours to walk through. That loss is threaded with agency, with ethics, with the unsettling knowledge that the ending was, at least in part, authored. It invites the mind to write alternative versions endlessly, and nostalgia, in that case, can become less a warm ache than a restless courtroom, replaying evidence, revising verdicts, asking for appeals that time does not grant.
So perhaps the question for this weekend is not “What do I miss,” but “What am I asking nostalgia to do for me.” Is it asking you to forgive what cannot be fixed, or to sanctify what was never sustainable, or simply to keep a certain tenderness from being wasted. When you think of the people who are gone, what do you owe them now, not in guilt, but in lived devotion. When you think of the people you left, or who left you, what part of you is still trying to turn separation into a monument, and what part of you is ready to let the living remain complicated, unfinished, unpinned. What does it mean to stop romanticising the past without becoming cruel to it. What does it mean to admit that some homes cannot be rebuilt, and still refuse to become homeless inside yourself.
If nostalgia can be dangerous, it is because it is so persuasive, and if it can be beautiful, it is because it is so honest. It arrives when the noise finally drops low enough for your own inner voice to become audible, and that is why solitude matters here, not as loneliness, but as the rare condition that allows the truth to surface without performance. Perhaps that is what a new year really offers, not a reinvention, but a small pause in which you can notice what has been shaping you beneath your plans.
CURRENT
GROUP EXHIBITION
UPCOMING
The Collaborators
Nettie Wild and Friends, Films and Installations
The Collaborators
Nettie Wild and Friends, Films and Installations
Opening February 28th, 2026
Above image: Scott Smith and Nettie Wild shooting Go Fish. Photo by David Boyes
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