Wallace Chan is a sculptor who is best known for his beautiful and intricate jewellery. However, he has been focusing on sculpture over recent years and 2024 marks his third time showing in Venice. His exhibition Transcendence is housed in the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà, right on the Giudecca canal, and is showing alongside the Venice Biennale.
I interviewed him in 2022 for his previous show Totems and in this follow up we talk about how his work has evolved, spirituality and his love for Venice. The interview was conducted through an interpreter and has been edited for brevity.
How has your work evolved from your previous exhibitions? And what can you tell us about these latest works?
The first exhibition was called Titans and it was a dialogue between material, space and time. The second one was called Totem where I created 10 metre high sculptures of faces in different parts, to invite viewers to go inside and to be part of the exhibition – to contemplate on the relationship between people and nature. This one is called Transcendence and it’s about going beyond our physical forms and physical limits to reach a meditative spiritual state.
This chapel is a place for worshipping God and then in contrast we have this sculpture here made of titanium, a space age metal – it’s a connection between the past and the future.
I see these sculptures as the seasons with the first one representing Winter – followed by Spring, Summer and Autumn.
Winter can be hard and tough, as is titanium with a melting point of 1700 degrees celsius, and through creating this work I went through my own Winter – confronting the depths of my own being, my fears, my doubts, my vulnerabilities. However, this is followed by the Spring and I found strength in the creative process mirroring the strength in the titanium.
When you look at the first sculpture, you see that it is concave as it’s inviting you to see yourself within it and this also means it looks different as you circle it with features appearing to disappear and then reappear. In my creative process disappearance equals existence and existence equals disappearance.
When I had my previous exhibitions I had no idea there would be a third one so the creative process involves an element of the new and the unknown. To me uncertainty is more valuable than certainty because there are more possibilities hidden within uncertainties.
In the end everything fades away and you cannot stop the changing of the seasons or the cycle of life – it will always move on. The only thing I can do is to make work that lives longer than I do, to make works that stand the test of time, that is the only way my ideas can transcend time.
Totems in 2022 had more works in it and this is a more tightly focused exhibition. How do you think that changes the dynamic of this exhibition?
I already knew what I had in mind for this exhibition but then last February the curator of this exhibition, James Puttnam, came to this chapel and found it as the ideal venue. So we went back to the workshop again to make a new series of sculptures specifically for this space. The chapel, the soundscape and sculptures all perfectly complement each other to allow visitors to enter the meditative state that I’m seeking to elicit in the viewer – viewers are welcome to look at the work, meditate and contemplate life in the space.
This is your third exhibition and the third incarnation of the sculptures. Will there be more exhibitions in this series and will it be in Venice again?
I’ve loved Venice since I was a child as there was a restaurant we used to go to in Hong Kong as a treat called Venice, so I fell in love with it before I even knew it was a real place. Once I knew it was a real place I visited right away and this was long before I had a contemporary art practice, so I’ve dreamed of having exhibitions in Venice for many years.
I’m very privileged to have had exhibitions in Venice and I don’t know what the future holds. However, Venice loves artists and artists love Venice so I’d love to return here with work in the future. For me, to create is to live and to live is to create, and I’ll always continue looking for new ways to create.
Wallace Chan: Transcendence, Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà – 30th September, free entry.
All images © the artist and Federico Sutera.
