In 2024, Pearl Reilly-Murray travelled back to China for a residency at the Luohang Arts Hill Festival in Foshan, joining two other Australian artists for a project titled 回归 (Return). The experience carried a quiet personal weight, offering a chance to reflect on a childhood spent in China and to reconnect with a place that had lingered more in memory than in language or detail.

Luohang made an impression: full of generosity, stillness, and the soft rhythm of everyday life. Days moved between painting, conversation, slow bike rides through the village, and casual moments with locals who welcomed the artists openly, even mid-shop in paint-splattered clothes. Being the only Mandarin speaker in the group, Pearl often helped translate and navigate, not just words, but small cultural moments that shaped the residency in subtle ways.

The work made during this time circled around memory, identity, and the overlaps between past and present. Paintings combined impressions of early life in Shanghai with the textures and imagery of Luohang — horses appearing often, as quiet markers of return, motion, and personal mythology. A piece titled Family Circle drew from observations of shared meals and family life, rituals of care and connection that quietly anchored the village.

Some works took shape in direct response to the place, using Chinese painting papers sourced in Australia, or building a bamboo sculpture with elderly locals in the village square. Though rural settings aren’t unfamiliar in Pearl’s practice, Luohang offered a different kind of quiet. The fruit trees, the evening air, the space between things — all fed into a slower, more grounded rhythm of making.

Return became less about going back and more about arriving — to a space between cultures, between languages, between versions of self — and finding something steady, if slightly in flux, within that in-between.