Wallace Chan /
Vessels of Other Worlds /
Shanghai
Long Museum West Bund
Jul 18 – Oct 25, 2026
Venice
Santa Maria Della Pietà
May 8 – Oct 18, 2026
This July, Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds arrives at Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai after opening in Venice at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà on 8 May 2026. Curated by James Putnam, the dual-site exhibition unfolds in the year of Chan’s 70th birthday.
The Shanghai presentation gives the project its largest form. Three titanium vessels, rising to approximately seven, eight and ten metres, will occupy the galleries of Long Museum West Bund. Their scale changes the conditions of viewing. What appeared in Venice within the charged intimacy of a sacred space becomes, in Shanghai, a set of environments large enough to enter, circle and inhabit.
The vessels are organised around birth, growth and rebirth, and take inspiration from Olea Sancta, or sacred oil. In religious tradition, sacred oil is associated with purification, protection, consecration and spiritual continuity. Chan does not illustrate these associations directly. Instead, he treats oil as a way of thinking about passage: something fluid, carried from one state to another, able to touch the body while suggesting a larger order of belief. Across the exhibition, hybrid forms and mythological imagery drawn from Chinese cosmology appear alongside suspended sculptural elements that evoke the dispersal of oil in space.
At the centre of the Shanghai presentation is Growth, an inhabitable vessel with a mirrored interior. Inside it, reflection becomes unstable. Light and image multiply, fracture and return, creating a shifting visual field around the viewer. The work draws on the optical logic of Chan’s Wallace Cut, the illusionary carving technique he invented in 1987, but moves it out of the gemstone and into architectural scale. A principle once held in the palm of the hand becomes a space for the body.
This change of scale is central to the exhibition. Chan’s career has often been described through the language of jewellery, yet his work has long pressed against the limits of that category. His use of carving, titanium, optical illusion and structural invention has repeatedly asked how small forms can carry large ideas. In Shanghai, that question becomes physical. The vessels are built structures, conceived through the same intensity of precision that shaped his earlier work, but extended into the space of the museum.
The Shanghai exhibition remains connected to Venice through a triptych of live digital screens presented at the altar of the Pietà Chapel. The installation keeps the two sites in real-time relation, bringing the sacred interior in Venice and the expansive galleries of Long Museum West Bund into dialogue. The two cities offer different conditions for the same body of work: Venice as a compressed encounter with ritual, architecture and history; Shanghai as the place where the vessels assume their full spatial presence.
Born in Hong Kong in 1956, Wallace Chan is a self-trained Chinese artist, sculptor and innovator whose practice spans jewellery art, carving, sculpture and installation. He began as a carver at the age of sixteen and has spent more than half a century working with material, structure and craftsmanship. His early development was shaped by traditional Chinese totems, architecture and sculpture, as well as by his study of Western sculptural language through statuary in Hong Kong’s Western cemeteries.
Over the decades, Chan has developed a series of techniques and inventions, including the Wallace Cut; his pioneering use of titanium in jewellery making; gemstone settings without metal claws; and the Wallace Chan Porcelain. Following a period of spiritual retreat in the early 2000s, his experiments with concrete, copper and stainless steel deepened his inquiry into matter, form and spiritual experience, laying the foundation for his later large-scale sculptures and installations.
Titanium has since become one of the defining materials of Chan’s practice. Light, strong and resistant, it allows him to pursue forms that depend on both delicacy and structural force. Through decades of research, he has carried the material from the intimacy of the body to the scale of architecture and space. In his hands, titanium is not only a technical medium. It is a way of testing endurance, pressure, balance and time.
The Shanghai presentation will also include works from Chan’s earlier Venice exhibitions, including Transcendence (2024), created with a soundscape by Brian Eno, as well as Totem (2022) and Titans (2021). Together, they trace the evolution of Chan’s sculptural language across material, scale and space, placing Vessels of Other Worlds within a longer inquiry into matter, spirit, transformation and existence.
