To Sleep and Wake Unafraid /
PF25 cultural projects /
Basel, Switzerland /
Jun 14–22, 2025 /
For his solo exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, Oscar Chan Yik Long created an environment of ink drawings.
Entering the space feels like entering a body, the inner skin of which is covered with images. They are wild and tender, haunting and peaceful, bleeding from memories and experiences, as bodies always carry the traces of our traumas and happy moments. Bleached out in black and white, they are like repercussions of moments lived through: monsters and guardians at the same time. There is no limit, there are no boundaries, only flow, like associations of the mind and bodily fluids, sour and sweet at once.
The space where this happens is a living room in a 16th-century building at the heart of medieval Basel. The walls are structured by painted panels and the ceiling is held up by mighty wooden beams, which together already create the atmosphere of a cosy cave, where time takes a breath and the heartbeat can slow. This most private of rooms is given to artists from time to time by curator Angelika Li and her partner Donald Mak, as part of their platform PF25 cultural projects.
This time it was Oscar Chan Yik Long’s turn. The Hong Kong-born artist, currently based in Helsinki, was a PF25 artist in residence in Basel in 2022, when he also featured in the group exhibition Homeland in Transit: Carried by the Wind. This resulted in his stupendous body of work about the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, especially from the two films As Tears Go By (1988) and Days of Being Wild (1990), with Chan drawing scenes featuring characters smoking and underlining them with his own thoughts about missing Hong Kong and the situation there.
For this year’s solo exhibition, he chose to immerse viewers in global mythology, with an installation developed out of the characteristics of the space. Three small, elongated ink drawings were enlarged and printed on three panels of flag fabric that stretched across the ceiling. They showed monstrous figures from different cultures, such as Chronos from Greek mythology, who is known for devouring his children, as well as manga characters. Morpheus is killing his siblings; there are numerous skulls and eyeballs; the Three Fates represent past, present and future; and there are classical features like the mountains and seas of traditional Chinese painting.
The title of the exhibition, To Sleep and Wake Unafraid, is taken from Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 movie Hour of the Wolf and refers to the present global situation, with wars and manifold uncertainties. But it also has a personal dimension: “Ninety-five percent of the dreams I remember are nightmares,” says Chan, while walking me through the exhibition. “And I love watching animations and horror movies from the 50s to the 90s where there is no CGI yet and you can still see how the atmosphere is created.” So it is no surprise the central panel shows a fight between a god of dreams and a monster. “It is a privilege to live without fear,” Chan says, pointing out that fear is a nearly universal feeling today but a rare subject in art. He uses fear to ask existential questions about how we deal with and even play with it, how we are watched and controlled by digital technologies, how our beliefs help us to deal with it and how we live our lives up till death.
As in his other enormous wall works in Freiburg, Germany and London, Chan develops compelling imagery that lets the visitor float in a timeless universe of associations that is nevertheless calm. The monsters from a previous series, A Horror to the Eyes of All Men Seeking Faith (2023), shimmer from the walls as demons and guardians at the same time. Decadence is the topic of these fallen angels. That Chan uses ink for his work even when painting directly on the walls heightens this impression by allowing a flow that can be soft in one corner and harsh at the next moment. If his imaginative associations were linked to philosophy, Plato’s cave would be the place.
The latest and smallest piece in the exhibition resumes the theme of the cigarette and links it to the body: on a small tray in a corner of the room rests a pack of cigarettes protected by a Plexiglas box. Chan removed the tobacco by hand and painted ink drawings of monsters on the paper. It was a pack of Marlboros, the sort of cigarettes that are culturally connected with stout masculinity. In the piece The most misplaced worry 2, they are without the brand imagery, have lost their power of seduction and stand for an act of self-salvation. “My former partner, like my dad, was a heavy smoker of Marlboros, and as a child I was in fear about the health of myself and my family,” says Chan. Fear: here it is again. Even the smallest object can hint at this personal, and currently also cultural, monster defining our lives. This compelling exhibition connects private life and global concerns.
Chan’s artist book My Body Is a Reincarnated Population was launched in Basel along with the exhibition. The show will have a second chapter, They Always Look from the Imagined Above, at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania this November.
To Sleep and Wake Unafraid
PF25文化項目
瑞士巴塞爾
2025年6月14日至22日
在瑞士巴塞爾的個展中，陳翊朗構建了一個水墨世界。
步入展廳，彷彿進入了一個身體，肌膚內壁上佈滿圖像。圖像既狂野又溫柔，擾人心神又撫慰心靈，像是從記憶與經歷中滲透出的血痕，正如我們的身體總承載著創傷與幸福的印記。它們褪去色彩，化為黑白，彷彿是那些親歷時刻的回響：既是怪物，也是守護者。這裡沒有邊際，沒有界限，唯有流動，如同思想的交織與體液的流動，酸澀與甘甜並存。
展覽地點在巴塞爾中世紀老城區中心一棟十六世紀建築的客廳內。牆面由彩繪畫板構成，天花板被粗大的木樑撐起 ，兩者營造出一種溫馨洞窟的氣氛。在這裡，時間徬佛能稍作喘息，心跳也隨之放緩。這間極其私密的空間由策展人李安琪和其拍檔麥乘彬不定期提供給藝術家們使用，作為他們PF25 文化項目平台的一部分。
此次輪到陳翊朗。這位出生於香港、現居赫爾辛基的藝術家，曾於 2022 年作為PF25駐地藝術家在巴塞爾進行創作，並參與群展「Homeland in Transit: Carried by the Wind」。期間他創作了一系列以香港導演王家衛為主題的精彩作品，尤其是聚焦電影《旺角卡門》（1988年）和《阿飛正傳》（1990年）——陳氏描繪了片中人物吸煙的場面，並在其中注入自己對香港的思念之情及當地現狀的思考。
在今年的個展中，他選擇讓觀者沈浸於全球神話的敘事中，依託空間特質創作了一個裝置作品。三幅細長的小幅水墨畫被放大後印制在三塊旗布上，橫跨整個天花板鋪開。畫面中呈現來自不同文化的怪物形象：如希臘神話里以吞噬子嗣而聞名的克洛諾斯，還有日本漫畫角色；描繪摩爾甫斯正在殺害兄弟姐妹的場面；數不盡的頭骨和眼球；象徵著過去、現在與未來的命運三女神；此外還有中國傳統畫中典型的山海元素。
是次展覽名「To Sleep and Wake Unafraid」取自英瑪·褒曼1968年的電影《午夜魔踪》，既影射當下戰爭頻發、充滿不確定性的環球局勢，也暗含藝術家的個人體驗。「在我能記得的夢中，95%都是噩夢，」陳氏在導覽時坦言，「我愛看50至90年代的動畫與恐怖片，那時還沒有電腦特效，你能看到氛圍是如何被營造出來的。」因此，展廳中央懸掛的旗布上呈現著夢神與怪物搏鬥的場景，也就不足為奇。陳翊朗指出：「能無所畏懼地活著是一種特權。」他指出，如今恐懼幾乎是一種普世情緒，卻極少成為藝術創作的主題。他借助恐懼叩問生存問題：我們如何應對乃至把玩恐懼？數碼科技如何監視與控制我們？信仰如何幫助我們對抗恐懼？以及，我們該如何渡過向死而生的一生？
如同陳氏在德國弗萊堡和倫敦創作的那些大型牆體作品一樣，他構建出極具感染力的意象，讓觀者漂浮在一個永恆而寧靜的聯想宇宙中。 過往系列作品《A Horror to the Eyes of All Men Seeking Faith》（2023年）中的怪物形象，正從牆面中隱現，既是惡魔，也是守護者。這些墮落天使指向 「頹廢」的主題。即便直接在牆面作畫時，陳氏仍堅持使用水墨，這更強化了觀感印象：水墨流動時，可在一隅柔和暈染，轉瞬又成凌厲筆觸。若要為他這些天馬行空的聯想找到哲學關聯，柏拉圖的洞穴隱喻或許是最佳注腳。
展覽中最新且最小型的作品重拾了香煙主題，並與身體意象相連：展廳角落的小托盤上，放著一包用有機玻璃罩保護起來的萬寶路香煙。陳氏親手剔除煙絲，並在卷煙紙上繪制了水墨怪物圖。這原本是一包萬寶路，這種香煙在文化中常與男子氣概掛鈎。而在這件名為《The most misplaced worry 2》的作品中，香煙去除了品牌標識，失去了誘惑力，轉而成為自我救贖的載體。「我的前任伴侶和我父親一樣，都是萬寶路『煙剷』，小時候的我總為家人和自己的健康憂心忡忡，」陳氏說道。恐懼——這個命題在此再度出現。即使最微小的物件，也能揭示這一定義著我們的生活、兼具個人性和當代文化性的怪物。這場引人入勝的展覽，將個體生活與全球議題縝密關聯。
陳翊朗的藝術家手書《轉世成身》與該展覽一同時間在巴塞爾出版。是次展覽的第二篇章「They Always Look from the Imagined Above」，將於今年11月在立陶宛維爾紐斯的Radvila Palace博物館舉行。