This summer, as his exhibition Vessels of Other Worlds unfolds across Venice and Shanghai, Chan’s work enters into a dialogue not only with space, but with the conditions of perception itself. What emerges is less an exhibition than a constellation of questions – about origin, transformation, and the limits of what can be known through form.
Slava Noor, a devoted admirer of Wallace Chan, met him in Venice to explore what it means to think through material.
Your practice has always resisted strict categorization, moving between sculpture, jewelry, and what might be called experimental material research. Do you find these categories limiting, or are they still useful as points of tension?
For me, sculpture, jewellery, and material research are just different ways of asking the same questions. I am more interested in what the work needs. Sometimes an idea becomes jewellery. Sometimes it becomes sculpture. Sometimes it asks for a new material or a new method. I always begin with curiosity.
You have often described creation as a process of listening rather than imposing. When you begin a work, what exactly are you listening for – the internal logic of the material, a form that already exists, or something less tangible that resists language altogether?
Listening means being patient enough to let the work tell me what it wants to become.
In your early years as a sculptor, long before your innovations in jewelry, you were already concerned with transformation and illusion. Looking back now, do you see your shift toward jewelry as a change of medium, or as a deepening of the same question?
I would not describe it as a shift towards jewellery or away from sculpture. For me, they have always existed together. In my jewellery, there is carving, sculpting, structure, and space. In my sculpture, there is still the same attention to detail, transformation, and illusion. So the question has always been the same. I am always asking how material can be transformed, and how form can carry spirit, feeling, memories and imagination.
The Wallace Cut refracts light in a way that almost destabilizes the boundary between surface and depth. When light behaves like this, does the gemstone remain an object, or does it begin to function more like an environment?
An object is never just an object. Its meaning always transcends its physical self. So when light begins to move inside the gemstone, what changes is not only the way we see it, but also the way we experience it. The stone is still there as a physical object, but its meaning opens beyond its surface. At that moment, it becomes a space of perception, memory, and imagination.
You have worked with materials that carry vastly different temporalities – porcelain, titanium, gemstones formed over geological time. How do you negotiate between these timescales without allowing one to dominate the others?
Each material carries its own time. If we look at nature, the coexistence of materials formed across very different timescales is simply the natural order of things. So I do not think of that as a problem. What matters more to me is the choice of material itself. I am drawn to materials that feel closest to eternity, because I want my works to stand the test of time and to outlive me.
Many viewers describe a sense of suspension when encountering your work, as if time slows down or folds in on itself. Is this an effect you consciously construct, or does it emerge as a byproduct of something more fundamental in your process?
If time seems to slow down, I think it comes from something deeper in the work. I am always concerned with time, transformation, and presence. So when the work is right, it may open a different experience of time Perhaps that is also a translation of my own experience. When I meditate, or when I create, time is no longer time in the ordinary sense.
Your upcoming exhibition Vessels of Other Worlds unfolds across Venice and Shanghai, existing simultaneously in two distinct spaces while retaining a single conceptual core; within this framework, the notion of the “vessel” recurs throughout your work, yet these forms rarely appear closed or containing in any conventional sense – how do you understand the idea of a vessel in this context: as something that holds, or as something defined by movement, passage, and transformation?
I want the vessels to remain empty and open, because emptiness is potential. It is the space where life, memory, spirit, and transformation can enter. And openness allows passage, change, and becoming. So for me, the vessel is both a form and a state. It is empty, and therefore it can contain. It is open, and therefore it can transform.
You left formal education at a very young age, yet your work engages deeply with philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. How did you arrive at this way of thinking outside institutional frameworks?
I arrived there through curiosity. Because I never received a formal education, I had to learn from life, from materials, and from experience. Since I was not confined by one school of thought, I had the freedom to think and overthink. And because there was no one there to guide or correct me, I could fail as many times as necessary.
There is a recurring paradox in your work: the more technically precise it becomes, the more it seems to open onto something intangible. Do you see technical mastery as a path toward immateriality?
Yes, I do. Technical mastery is not an end in itself. It is a path that allows the material to go beyond itself. That, for me, is the true purpose of mastery.
Over the decades, you have built a language that is unmistakably your own. At this stage in your career, do you still experience moments of uncertainty, or has the process become more resolved?
Each moment holds both certainty and uncertainty. I am certain that an idea can come true, and at the same time I walk into the unknown, where uncertainty is everywhere. But it is because of uncertainty that the creative process remains meaningful and exciting. It is simply life. Life is uncertain.
If one were to step back and look at your entire body of work not as individual pieces but as a single, unfolding inquiry, what would you say is the central question that continues to guide you?
Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?
