Wallace Chan speaks about Venice as if he had been bound to it long before he ever arrived there.
As a child in Hong Kong, Venice first existed to him as the name of a café he could not afford to enter – a place associated less with the city itself than with pineapple buns, drinks, and the sense of somewhere just out of reach.
When he first came to Venice over thirty years ago, that distance began to shift. What had once been imagined from afar started to take form through direct encounter with the city, its architecture, and the Biennale. Over time, Venice became less an idea and more a place through which his work could be tested, returned to, and realised at scale.
Long before Venice became home to some of the most ambitious works of his career, it had already functioned as a point of return.
During the opening days of the Venice Biennale, inside the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, Vessels of Other Worlds sits within the space as though it had always belonged there. Three large titanium sculptures rest across the floor, immediate in presence but not immediately readable, their relationship to the architecture only revealed through movement.
There is a sense that what is now realised once existed only as possibility – not in a romantic register, but in the position of his younger self, working without certainty or recognition. Seen in that light, the work returns to its underlying logic – birth, growth, and rebirth – not as symbolism fixed to the sculptures, but as something mirrored in the act of making across a lifetime. It also touches, more on how a life is lived: in phases that do not erase one another, but accumulate, allowing what came before to remain present within what comes next, even as something new begins again.
The sculptures change as you move around them. One position holds them in place; a few steps later, that hold slips. No view settles long enough to feel final.
The work is structured around three states – birth, growth, rebirth – drawn from the symbolism of sacred oils in Catholic ritual. But inside the chapel, those states do not unfold in sequence. They sit together, overlapping, and held at the same time.
It makes the idea of progression feel less certain than it sounds on paper. Chan is not especially interested in explaining that effect in poetic terms. He is direct about it.
“My practice is built over decades,” he tells MOJEH MEN. “It does not change because of reaction. But I notice what people notice. Some things only appear after time. Each person sees differently; what they see is never quite the same as the person who walked in before them. That difference is where the work lives – in interpretation, not resolution.”
That idea becomes clearer in the room than in the sentence. You do not finish looking at the work. You return to it. And each return feels slightly different, not because the sculptures have changed, but because your attention has.
The detailing in each piece is so meticulous it pulls the eye deeper into it, as if there is no single point at which looking can stop. What holds at first glance begins to separate into smaller systems the longer you stay.
There is a second part of the Venice project at Scala Contarini del Bovolo – a late-Gothic spiral staircase near Campo Manin, set within a small courtyard and already defined by centuries of architectural presence. Mythos enters this structure without displacing it.
As you begin to climb the spiral, the work appears alongside the staircase rather than apart from it. Suspended forms sit just off the line of ascent, encountered in fragments as you move past them. The building does not operate as a neutral frame; it remains active in the experience at every point of the climb.
Inside the building, more of the sculptures appear. The atmosphere shifts in a way that is difficult to name but instant in effect. Shadows slide across the titanium surfaces as you move, and the works seem to reconfigure themselves slightly with each change in position.
There is a point where looking stops being purely analytical. You find yourself confronted with the question of how such precision is physically possible – not as rhetoric, but as a genuine pause in comprehension. Chan’s work produces that moment of hesitation. It sits at the edge of understanding, where technical mastery and visual excess meet, and briefly unsettle the assumptions of what can be made at all.
The Venice presentation does not function as a closed statement. It forms part of a broader dual-site project that continues in July at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai, where a separate body of work is presented in parallel.
In Venice, Vessels of Other Worlds is installed within the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà through the three main monumental titanium sculptures, accompanied by a triptych of video screens positioned on the altar. These screens do not document the work. They act as a threshold between the two cities, revealing the Shanghai installation while it is still absent from Venice.
In Shanghai, a new series of monumental titanium sculptures is introduced at a dramatically larger scale, reaching up to ten metres in height. One of the central works is made fully inhabitable, allowing the body to enter the interior rather than remain outside it. Alongside these, works from earlier Venice projects – including Titans (2021), Totem (2022), and Transcendence (2024) – are brought into proximity, setting different moments of Chan’s practice against one another.
Seen together, Venice and Shanghai form two distinct spatial conditions: one shaped by enclosure, ascent, and architectural compression; the other by expansion, scale, and open interior distance. The relationship between them is not sequential, but structural – a way of testing how form behaves under different physical and cultural pressures.
Chan frames the connection in simple terms. “Venice and Shanghai are both shaped by water,” he says. “That is the connection.”
“I don’t see an ending in making,” he adds. “Only a continuation. Each work leads to the next way of thinking.”
The works do not resolve between the two cities. They remain in parallel, differently configured by each, holding within them the cycle first framed in Venice – birth, growth, and rebirth – not as fixed symbolism, but as something continually reactivated through encounter. To witness them in person is to move, in your own way, through that same cycle: a reminder of childhood, of change and evolution, and of the possibility of beginning again, each time differently.
Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds, opened on 8 May and running until 18 October 2026 alongside the 61st Venice Biennale.
