Partial view of Birth (2025) by Wallace Chan, from the ‘Vessels of Other Worlds’ installation at the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai. Photo: Tian Fangfang
The reputation of Wallace Chan (b. 1956), who began his career as a gemstone carver at the age of 16 and has since made his name as a jewellery artist and sculptor, has been built on the work he has done at a minute scale. Take the butterfly brooch currently in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in which five open-set rubellites in diamond-studded settings adorn a body from which two titanium wings spread elegantly outwards. It may be 13cm wide, but it is the detail at the smallest scale that draws and delights the eye.
But Chan has never been comfortably contained by jewellery, and in his latest work – which can be seen in a dual-site exhibition at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice and the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai – he is scaling up. The two shows, curated by James Putnam, centre around monumental titanium sculptures, and though Chan is working at a much larger level, his knack for exploring the play of light on carefully deployed materials is still very much in evidence.
In this new project, titled ‘Vessels of Other Worlds’, Chan’s precision and structural nous take on architectural scale, as though the inner world of a gemstone has been turned inside out and magnified. Chan has taken inspiration from olea sancta – the oil vessels used in Catholic blessing rituals – to explore themes of containment, transformation and passage. In Venice, three colourful, modular sculptures take up the narrow interior of the Chapel, encouraging the viewer to move through a series of states. But where the setting’s meditative nature – not to mention the reflective surfaces of the sculpture – encourages us to look inwards, the sculptures in Shanghai are about expansion, occupying far more space and stretching up to 10 metres high.
Although the two installations are separated by geography, technology collapses the gap. In Venice, a triptych of video screens broadcast the sculptures’ monumental counterparts in Shanghai. The effect is of two cities becoming dimly aware of one another through sculpture.
Much of the power of these works lies in the tension between what titanium is and what Chan makes of it. Titanium is prized in aerospace and engineering for its strength and lightness; in Chan’s hands it appears to billow, fold and turn with ease. Thousands of meticulously assembled components take on forms that seem improbably fluid. Chan has often spoken of titanium as the material ‘closest to eternity’ – an idea that is given form by these restlessly dynamic, ever-glinting sculptures.
What makes ‘Vessels of Other Worlds’ so compelling, then, is not so much its technical bravura as its conceptual ambition – its faith in the idea that sculpture can hint at the metaphysical while remaining playful, imaginative and lovely to behold.
‘Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds’ is at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, Venice, from 8 May–18 October and the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, from 18 July–25 October. Find out more about Wallace Chan’s work here.
