Wallace Chan’s New Sculptures Challenge the Idea of Monumentality

The air hangs heavy, wet against my skin. It’s July and it’s 40 degrees in Shanghai. As I take a few more steps in this city-sized sauna, the vast concrete architecture of the Long Museum rises into view. Designed by Liu Yichun of Atelier Deshaus on the site of a former coal transportation wharf, its soaring umbrella-vault ceilings create a fitting threshold for Hong Kong–based artist Wallace Chan’s largest works to date.

I first spoke with Mr Chan back in 2019 to learn about his mesmerising jewellery. As our conversations continued over the years, I gained an appreciation of just how expansive his approach to artmaking is.

Vessels of Other Worlds in Shanghai marks the second chapter of an exhibition first unveiled earlier this year during the opening of the Venice Biennale. Installed within the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, a live camera streamed the construction process from Mr Chan’s workshop, while smaller iterations of the monumental works offered an intimate encounter with sculptures still taking shape thousands of miles away in China.

Now, at the Long Museum, that relationship is elegantly reversed. The completed sculptures occupy the space in full, while a live transmission reconnects visitors with Venice, allowing the two exhibitions to exist in constant dialogue.

“Venice is a city of water, memory, silence and accumulated time. Shanghai is also shaped by water, but its energy is more open, urban and forward-moving. One feels inward, the other expansive; one carries history like a whisper, the other allows the work to stand with its full body. For me, this difference was exactly why they belonged together. Vessels of Other Worlds is about passage: from one place to another, from one scale to another, from the visible to the invisible. Venice gave the works an intimate, almost embryonic beginning; Shanghai allowed them to grow, to unfold, and to meet the audience at the scale of the body and the city,” the artist shares.

Three monumental titanium sculptures, rising seven, eight and ten metres into the Long Museum’s vast galleries, dominate the space. Composed of thousands of individual titanium components, their surfaces teem with human figures, mythological creatures, suspended faces and references to Chinese mythology. Inspired by Olea Sancta, the sacred oils used in Catholic rites of blessing and purification, subtle chromatic shifts of yellow, red and blue evoke cycles of transformation.

Mr Chan has spent more than five decades pushing materials beyond what they were thought capable of. Beginning as a gemstone carver at the age of sixteen, he has introduced innovations ranging from the illusionistic Wallace Cut to pioneering the artistic use of titanium in jewellery, patented jadeite technologies, clawless gemstone settings and, most recently, Wallace Chan Porcelain, a material five times stronger than steel.

“For me, innovation appears because the work asks for something that does not yet exist,” he explains. “When an idea is beyond the available method, I have to invent a new method. When a material refuses me, I have to understand it more deeply and find another way. So technical innovation is not separate from creation. It is part of the path. The Wallace Cut, titanium, porcelain, new tools, new structures – they all came from trying to realise something that first seemed impossible. I do not innovate for novelty. I innovate because without it, the work cannot be born.”

Every curve and seamless surface of his enormous sculptures conceal months of planning. “For works of this scale, installation begins long before the sculptures arrive,” Mr Chan says. “Every component, every joint, every screw, every point of balance has to be calculated and tested. The sculpture may look like one body, but it is actually made from thousands of parts, and each part has its own position and responsibility.”

Mr Chan expands: “When we install, it is almost like assembling a living organism. Structure, weight, light, movement, safety, circulation and the viewer’s body all have to be considered together. One small adjustment can change the energy of the whole work. But we did most of the assembling at the workshop first, and put the last few major parts together at the Long Museum. For me, the most important thing is that the technical process must disappear in the final experience. The audience should not only feel how difficult the work was to install. They should feel that the sculpture is breathing naturally in the space, as if it had always belonged there.”

Alongside the monumental sculptures sit Mr Chan’s celebrated jewels, butterflies and intricate gemstone carvings. Seen together, they dissolve any lingering distinction between jewellery and sculpture.

“Jewellery is sculpture for the body, and sculpture is jewellery for the earth,” Mr Chan reflects. “In a jewel, the world is held close to the skin, entered through the eye, through light, through intimacy. In the monumental sculptures, that same world opens outward, and the viewer enters with the whole body. By placing them together, I wanted people to feel that the movement from the very small to the very large is not a break in my practice. It is the same search unfolding at different scales. A brooch of a few centimetres can contain a universe; a ten-metre sculpture still needs the precision and inner life of a jewel.”

These monumental works are not a departure from Mr Chan’s practice, but a continuation of it. Before becoming one of the world’s most celebrated jewellery artists, he began his career carving religious sculptures from stone. These towering new titanium vessels feel less like a new direction than a return to those origins. Whether encountered with the whole body or held in the palm of a hand, Mr Chan’s works remind us that wonder is not measured in metres or millimetres.



Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds is on view at the Long Museum until 18 October 2026.



Feature image: Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds at the Long Museum. Courtesy Wallace Chan