Wallace Chan /
Vessels of Other Worlds /
Venice /
Santa Maria Della Pietà
May 8 – Oct 18, 2026
Shanghai /
Long Museum West Bund
Jul 18 – Oct 25, 2026
To coincide with the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Wallace Chan presents Vessels of Other Worlds, a dual-site exhibition unfolding between Venice and Shanghai. The project marks the artist’s 70th birthday and introduces a new body of monumental titanium sculpture. Curated by James Putnam, the exhibition extends Chan’s longstanding investigation into material innovation, metaphysics, and scale.
At the Pietà Chapel, three titanium vessels reference the Olea Sancta — the sacred oils used in Catholic rites — and are structured around the triad of birth, growth, and death/rebirth. Their biomorphic and architectonic forms evoke the layered cosmologies of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, while remaining grounded in Chan’s sculptural language. Installed within the Chapel’s altar space, a triptych of video screens operates as a live conduit to Shanghai, collapsing geographical distance and situating the exhibition within a transcontinental framework.
At the Long Museum, the central vessel, Growth, is realised at an immersive scale. Visitors enter its mirrored interior, where optical fragmentation recalls Chan’s proprietary illusionary innovation of the 1980s, the Wallace Cut. Here, carving logic becomes spatial architecture, and sculpture shifts from object to environment.
Vessels of Other Worlds marks Chan’s fourth exhibition in Venice, following Titans (2021) and Totem (2022) at Fondaco Marcello, and Transcendence (2024) at the Pietà Chapel, created with a soundscape by Brian Eno. Together, these projects establish an ongoing dialogue between Venice and Shanghai. The Long Museum presentation situates the new works alongside earlier Venice exhibitions, reframing them within a broader institutional context.
Chan reflects: “I was not shaped by formal academic structures. My education came through material and mastery. In life, potential is emptiness. In death, emptiness becomes potential. These vessels hold permanence within impermanence.”
Rather than presenting sculpture as an isolated monument, Vessels of Other Worldsexamines transmission, scale, and cyclical temporality across sites. By positioning titanium — a material associated with endurance and aerospace engineering, and which Chan regards as the closest material to eternity — within sacred and institutional contexts, the exhibition advances a sustained inquiry into permanence, transformation, and the shifting meaning of monumentality across cultures.
