What Remains After the Holy

On Evgeniy Lapchenko’s Cave of relics

Somewhere in a cave, a lamp has burned out.

Around it sit the things people once begged over, kissed, and wept beside. They wait in the half-dark, perfectly still. Nobody is praying. Nobody is coming.

This is the world of Evgeniy Lapchenko’s Cave of relics (2024, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm, from the Saint series): a chamber of holy objects gathered over time. His own statement is the sharpest way in. Each relic, he says, is honoured exactly once, then kept. One moment of devotion, followed by a very long afterwards.

That afterwards is the real subject. Devotion is easy to picture when it is loud: knees on stone, a voice breaking mid-sentence. It is harder to picture the next morning, and the one after. The object stays. The feeling that made it holy does not. So what do we call a thing that is still treasured, but no longer needed? The painting asks what changes when a sacred object becomes furniture.

Kintsugi lives inside the same question.

A bowl breaks. Someone sits with it, brings lacquer and gold, and mends it slowly, almost like a prayer. And then, this is the part we forget, the ceremony ends and the bowl goes back to the shelf. It holds tea. It gets washed. It may break again. The gold seam remains, a small relic of the day someone decided this was worth keeping.

Perhaps that is what a relic really is: not the object, but the care that outlived the hands that gave it.

We all keep a cave of our own. A voice note we cannot delete. A prayer once spoken with total certainty. An old self we have outgrown but cannot bring ourselves to throw away. We do not visit them every day. Yet we cannot call them ordinary, either.

So this Wednesday, no verdict is needed. You do not have to believe again, and you do not have to let go. Step into your own cave for a moment, hold one thing up to the light, and ask: who first held this with such care, and what did they hope it would become?

Then you may leave it exactly where it is. Some things are allowed simply to be kept.

View Cave of relics in the Gallery

— Hanin Azizah Director, Indonesia · Kintsugi Gallery

Wednesday, 28 October 2026