Oscar Chan Yik Long /
Jun 14 – 22, 2025 /
Opening: Friday, Jun 13, 5pm – 8pm /
PF25 cultural projects
Pfeffergässlein 25
Entrance via Nadelberg 33 to Pfeffergässlein 25
4051 Basel, Switzerland
T +41 61 209 92 59
By appointment only
Exhibition viewing request link
PF25 cultural projects is delighted to present To Sleep and Wake Unafraid, Oscar Chan Yik Long’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland and the opening chapter of his two-part solo series unfolding in 2025. Part of PF25’s Spring Programme and the Art Basel VIP Programme, this site-specific presentation takes place in a 16th-century building in the heart of Basel’s Old Town.
Known for his ink paintings and large-scale ephemeral murals, Chan’s practice draws from East Asian philosophy, mythology, and spiritual traditions, interwoven with Western classical and symbolist influences. Horror cinema and global pop culture further shape his visual language, bridging ancestral memory with contemporary experience. In recent years, he has focused on the holistic links between the human body and emotions in Chinese tradition—particularly how fear, anger, anxiety, sadness, and joy correspond to internal organs.
Titled after a line from Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 film Hour of the Wolf, the exhibition reflects on the liminal hours before dawn—when the conscious and unconscious intermingle. For Chan, these early hours resonate with those navigating complexity and difference in their lived experience, while also expressing a universal longing—and right—for self-understanding, healing, and renewal.
The exhibition examines how daily gestures shape the body and mind, and how these, in turn, transform one another. Drawing on Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chan explores the interplay between physical and emotional states through repetition, ritual, and vulnerability.
A new cycle of paintings and an installation, also titled To Sleep and Wake Unafraid, introduces phantasmagorical figures from Chan’s evolving personal mythology. At its centre is The fight between dream and nightmare (2025), where two protagonists clash amidst a constellation of hybrid beings, mythic figures, and wandering souls. The two may evoke Morpheus and Phobetor—mythical personifications of dream and nightmare—yet are reimagined through Chan’s own cosmology, shaped by Eastern mythology and personal iconography.
These motifs extend into the overhead textile installation, To Sleep and Wake Unafraid(2025), where Chronos grips a clock in the East; skeletal armies gather in the South; a protective flower deity rises in the West; and in the North, a hybrid bestiary emerges—echoing the ancient Classic of Mountains and Seas. Overhead, the Three Fates perform a choreography of time, drawing viewers into a shifting cosmology of motion and transformation.
Also presented in Switzerland for the first time is A Horror to the Eyes of All Men Seeking Faith (2023), its title drawn from The Exorcist III. This earlier series reflects on fear, decadence, and spiritual collapse through fallen angels. Chan links their descent to human greed and disconnection from nature. In Fallen Angels: Eve, a figure extracts a creature from her body and silences her voice. In Fallen Angels: Adam, a blindfolded figure holds an eyeball in his mouth—still seeing, but unable to speak. These gestures echo the fragility of belief and the existential question: Who am I? For Chan, this question becomes a compass against disorientation—a way through the polarity of illumination and descent. Reflecting on his state of mind while painting the fallen angels, Chan described the glow surrounding them as a reflection of the light he carried in his heart — a quiet manifestation of protection, inner strength, and conflicted grace. Their presence hovers between illumination and descent, offering not only a portrayal of spiritual collapse but also a gesture of resilience in the face of fear and uncertainty.
Emerging from these reflections is The most misplaced worry 2 (2025), a new work that transforms anxiety through quiet ritual. A transparent cigarette box holds twenty tobacco-less paper cylinders, each painted with microscopic worlds inhabited by fantastical beings. The work recalls Chan’s 2022 collaboration with PF25 in Homeland in Transit: Carried by the Wind, inspired by smoking protagonists from Wong Kar Wai’s films. Here, the cigarette becomes a site of personal inscription, where worry is stripped of function and gently reimagined.
The exhibition continues in November with its second chapter, They Always Look from the Imagined Above, at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius, curated by Anders Kreuger, Director of Kunsthalle Kohta, Helsinki.
Featured image: The Fight between Dream and Nightmare (2025) by Oscar Chan Yik Long, Chinese ink on paper, 44.5 x 43.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and PF25.
