Wallace Chan’s Vessels of Other Worlds: A Monument of Jewellery in Venice and Shanghai
The Venice exhibition opens on May 8, 2026, at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, while the parallel exhibition at the Long Museum in Shanghai will open July 18, 2026. Through this dual project, Chan explores themes of spirituality, transformation, and continuity, offering a vision of art as a space where material, philosophy, and perception converge.
Wallace Chan
Your practice spans sculpture, high jewellery, and craftsmanship. How would you define the boundaries between these disciplines in your work? How has your background in gemstone carving and jewellery-making influenced the creation of monumental sculptures such as those in “Vessels of Other Worlds”?
Everything, big or small, is infinite. Jewellery works at a minute scale. It allows you to encounter infinity under a microscope. Over decades, working at that scale has honed my understanding of structure, engineering, and material – how parts come together to form meaning. There are no strict boundaries between these disciplines in my work. They inform one another. Without jewellery, my monumental sculptures would not have come into being.
The Venetian exhibition engages with a space deeply connected to Christian spirituality. How does Christian symbolism, such as the Olea Sancta and the cycle of birth, growth, and death, relate to your artistic and spiritual vision?
All religions are philosophies. They are questions and contemplations about existence. Across East and West, the language may differ, but the human impulse is the same. We continue to ask: Who am I? Why am I here? What lies beyond what we can see?
In every culture, people turn to objects, rituals, and vessels to approach what cannot be fully explained. Religion, for me, is not doctrine. It is a method of inquiry – a way of moving from one state of understanding to another without insisting on a single answer.
Your exhibition links two very different cities, Venice and Shanghai, with works that interact across physical and virtual spaces, using video and footage to create a ‘portal’ between the two sites. How did you conceive this connection between the cities and between the visitors of both spaces, and what do you hope the audience experiences through this shared encounter?
The element of video transmission is rather a symbolic one. But it brings into our existence the existence of the other worlds, which we often are not mindful of. If that awareness remains, then the work continues beyond the exhibition.
The two sites inform one another through presence and distance. In Venice, live transmissions from China extend the reality of the sculptures beyond the chapel. In Shanghai, the Venice presentations are understood as part of a larger system. Together they form a single project unfolding in two locations.
The works are presented in two very different contexts: the intimacy of the Pietà Chapel and the monumentality of the Long Museum. How important is the exhibition context to you, and in what ways does the change in scale and space transform the experience of your sculptures?
The Chapel is long, narrow, and quiet. It is not monumental in scale, but it carries centuries of presence. It requires concentration rather than expansion. At the Long Museum, I explore monumentality through physical scale. In the Chapel, I explore monumentality through complexity and restraint. The architecture shapes the work. It asks the sculpture to respond, not to dominate. In Venice, the vessels exist in a state of becoming. The space encourages inward reflection. That condition is different from Shanghai, where the sculptures stand fully realised in open architectural volume.
In recent years you have visited Venice many times for your previous exhibitions. How has returning repeatedly to this city – with its history, its waters, and its light – influenced your practice and the conception of “Vessels of Other Worlds”?
Venice inspires me – its water, its light, its water in the light, its light in the water. But most importantly, it is one of the very few cities where contemporary art meets traditional craftsmanship. That coexistence matters to me. It reflects how I approach my own work, where material, technique, and idea must exist together.
Each return to Venice is different. The city does not remain still, and neither does my way of seeing it. “Vessels of Other Worlds” is about bridging different worlds, and Venice has done this in a very poetic way.
You describe your vessels as containers of memory, spirit, and transformation. Could you elaborate on how these concepts are embodied in the forms and materials of the sculptures?
A vessel is defined by what it holds, but also by what it makes possible. In these works, what is contained cannot be seen. Memory, spirit, and transformation do not have fixed form, but they shape the structure.
Each vessel is constructed from thousands of interdependent components. Nothing exists in isolation. The structure depends on relationship, on movement, on continuity. Titanium allows this complexity to exist. It provides the stability required for an open system, where light, space, and time can enter the work. My vessels are empty. Wherever they are placed, the space they occupy becomes their content.
You have developed a unique approach to working with titanium, a material you describe as ‘closest to eternity’. How does the material itself shape the creative process and the final expression of your sculptures?
Titanium is demanding. Its melting point is close to 1,700 degrees Celsius. It has strong memory and resists manipulation. You cannot dominate it. You have to understand it. When you are working on it, it is also working on you.
The three vessels to be shown at the Long Museum are physically heavy. They stand seven, eight, and ten meters tall, and the seven-meter vessel alone weighs 4.6 tons. Titanium is lighter than many other structural metals, but there is nothing light about these works in physical terms. What it allows is structural precision at this scale. Thousands of components interlock and remain stable as one system.
Titanium resists corrosion and survives extreme conditions. It is destined to outlive me. So it becomes my ultimate embodiment. In “Vessels of Other Worlds”, it gives physical form to the cycle of Birth, Growth, and Rebirth. Birth is constructed as an interdependent mechanism – gears and human figures embedded within the structure – suggesting that existence begins in movement and relationship. Growth expands in scale and spatial complexity, allowing the viewer to enter and experience the structure from within. Rebirth folds the cycle back into itself. It is not an ending, but a return. It allows me to approach the idea of continuity as a possibility.
