Wallace Chan: From a Broken Spoon to Monumental Sculptures in Shanghai
At the Long Museum West Bund, “Vessels of Other Worlds” explores Wallace Chan’s practice through titanium sculptures, memory and fragility, in dialogue with Venice.
Hong Kong, early 1960s. There is a table, a family eating and a five-year-old boy. His name is Wallace. There is not much money in the house. Objects are kept, repaired, passed down. The children eat with plastic spoons. The adults, meanwhile, use porcelain ones.
One day Wallace picks one up. He looks at it, holds it in his hands. Then it slips from his grasp. It falls to the floor and breaks. His father does not think twice, and the boy is punished.
The story could end there, like thousands of small domestic accidents destined to fade from anyone’s childhood memories. But little Wallace does not forget. He cannot understand how something so hard can break so easily. It is a contradiction that will stay with him throughout his life. The first, perhaps, in a long series.
That boy is Wallace Chan, one of the Chinese contemporary artists best known in his homeland for his ability to transform materials. Today he creates monumental titanium sculptures, but to understand his journey we need to return to that episode and look deeper.
Wallace Chan "Vessels of Other Worlds" - Long Museum "Birth Sculpture"
Chan was born in 1956 in Fuzhou, southeastern China, and moved to Hong Kong when he was five. His is not a story of prestigious academies or a family of artists. At thirteen, he began working. At sixteen, he became an apprentice gemstone carver. He learnt by watching, making mistakes and trying again. As a boy, he was also fascinated by Western sculpture, which he discovered in Christian cemeteries, standing before marble figures of saints and angels. Silent actors in an iconography filled with pain and deprivation.
In 1987, Chan took his work further and developed the Wallace Cut, a carving technique that uses reflections and perspective to multiply faces within a gemstone. What he creates is something unique: carvings that bring infinite worlds to life within a single image. The material deceives the eye, compelling it to search for something that does not exist in the form in which it appears.
Success comes, but it does not stop him. His story flows with the force of a river and the determination of a single drop. In the early 2000s, Chan turned his life upside down, temporarily leaving his work behind and spending six months in a Buddhist monastic community. He gave up his possessions, meditated and sought answers that were no longer concerned with art alone. When he returned, he had to start again. He used concrete, copper and steel—materials a world away from the gemstones that had made him famous.
It is through this constant experimentation that his practice takes on a new dimension. Chan works on strengthening porcelain, develops new techniques and eventually turns to titanium, a lightweight, corrosion-resistant metal that is difficult to shape. He first uses it for jewellery, then for increasingly large sculptures.
The boy who broke a spoon now begins to build something that can withstand time.
Wallace Chan standing by 10 metre "Vessels of Other Worlds - Rebirth" - photograph by Tian Fangfang
To discover his work, I am in Shanghai in the first days of October 2026. At the Long Museum West Bund, his works have reached unimaginable proportions. Vessels of Other Worlds, the exhibition curated by James Putnam, presents three large titanium sculptures standing seven, eight and ten metres tall. They represent birth, growth and death. They are vessels, at least in name, but they look like organisms from another world. Forms intertwine, surfaces reflect light, details multiply. Worlds where Eastern spirituality and Western Catholic tradition meet.
The installation is one of the exhibition’s most accomplished aspects. The lighting, the arrangement of the works and their relationship with the museum’s architecture create a journey that draws visitors into the artist’s universe. Visitors can walk through one of the sculptures: inside, mirrors create kaleidoscopic effects that recall the Wallace Cut technique. What Chan once did inside a gemstone, he now achieves in a space large enough to hold several people.
The exhibition is also in dialogue with Venice, where three other sculptures were presented at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà. The two cities, connected to water and its capacity for transformation, are brought together through images transmitted between them on small monitors.
For Chan, these large vessels are containers of memory, emotion and spirit. Objects made from a material intended to last, yet conceived to speak of what we cannot hold on to and what is destined to disappear.
Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai
Standing before those monumental works, one begins to understand what obsesses the artist. It is this contradiction, above all, that strikes me most about his practice. Matter can be worked, altered, made more resistant so that it cannot break. Time, meanwhile, continues to flow, like the river I mentioned earlier. Bodies age, people disappear, memories change shape.
More than sixty years after the incident with the spoon, I find myself at a table with Wallace and a delegation of Italian journalists. We share an excellent meal, with elegantly presented dishes and refined combinations of flavours. I cannot help picturing that spoon on the floor, broken into small fragments, that scene where it all began.
The boy who did not understand why it had broken now knows what it means. He knows how materials react, how light behaves, how to create a stronger structure.
Perhaps because, on that day, he discovered more than the fact that porcelain can break. He discovered that even things that seem made to last can disappear, and that sometimes we spend a lifetime trying to hold them together, feeding our deepest fears and contradictions.
Wallace Chan "Vessels of Other Worlds - Venice" - "Growth Sculpture"
Cover image: Wallace Chan, Vessels of Other Worlds – Long Museum, Birth sculpture.
Alessio Vigni works across art, writing and digital communications. He writes for several magazines and creates editorial projects and podcasts that explore the stories and people shaping contemporary culture.
As a consultant, he develops digital strategies and content for cultural organisations and businesses, combining a passion for storytelling with the languages of digital platforms. He is Editor-in-Chief and Head of Communications at Cottura Creativa.
