Oscar Chan Yik Long /
They always look from an imagined above /
Nov 27, 2025 – Mar 15, 2026 /
The Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art
24 Vilniaus Street
Vilnius, Lithuania
T +370 5 250 5824
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 11am – 7pm
Thursday 12am – 8pm
Sunday 11am – 5pm
Oscar Chan Yik Long (Hong Kong, 1988, lives in Helsinki) works mostly in Chinese ink. His paintings and drawings are mostly based on motifs from East Asian mythology or other esoteric traditions.
This is his first solo exhibition in a museum, and it contains both new and existing works. Its title, They always look from an imagined above, also names a temporary ink mural (2025) on the vaulted ceiling of the a seventeenth-century Radvila Palace. Who are ‘they’? What is the ‘above’ and why is it ‘imagined’?
Chan is not telling us. He has placed Cosmic egg (2021), a woollen rug, under the mural. The rug alludes to a creation myth, but again without explanation. In an adjacent space, the walls and ceilings receive the projected work Patrol (2025), where ‘they’ – rudimentary figures evoking human skeletons – make another unexplained appearance.
Chan’s work is not backed up with meticulous narratives. Instead, his images celebrate open-ended co-creation with varied audiences. There is storytelling, but the story often finds itself displaced and condensed by the abundance of figures in action.
That happens in The earthly branches (2025), a series of twelve stretched canvases connected to form free-standing folding screens. Sized after Chan’s own physical body, these ink paintings also become emblems of the Chinese zodiac signs: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig.
The ten-part ink painting I look at my own dead body (2025) is a stretched-out landscape-like rendering of a skeleton stripped of all perishable body tissue. The original vision came to Chan in a dream where he saw his own corpse on display in a European museum.
Displacement and condensation (the terms Sigmund Freud uses to describe how dreams work), divination (the desire to see the future in the past), imagination and fabulation – these are the creative strategies that allow Chan’s work to transform horror into understanding, and ultimately redemption.
He sometimes uses explicitly illustrative formats such as the playing card or the picture book. In this exhibition he premieres the 22 ink and marker drawings of the series Tarot cards (Major Arcana) (2025). He also shows selected ink drawings from his first artist book My Body Is a Reincarnated Population (Kraków: Bored Wolves, 2024).
Only one work in They always look from an imagined above is polychromous. The king of ghosts (2021) is a factory-made figurine, visualising a Chinese legend. It reminds us that those we might be afraid of (the ghosts in their kingdom) are, in turn, afraid of someone (their king) or something – which may very well be fear itself.
The exhibition is curated by Anders Kreuger and organised by the Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, in collaboration with Kunsthalle Kohta in Helsinki and PF25 Cultural Projects in Basel and financially supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
