In Venice, Wallace Chan’s Titanium Sculptures Offer Introspection and Reckoning

The 18th-century church, which faces the Grand Canal’s busiest ferry strip off of Piazza San Marco, has been a place of return for Chan, who has presented shows during two former biennials. While the 2024 show, “Transcendence,” was scored by none other than multidisciplinary musician Brian Eno, La Serenissima’s own sonic bearings—whether a piece of “The Four Seasons” from the neighbor or occasionally seagulls and tourists searchingly yelping—soundtrack the current outing. “We all live in sounds, although sometimes these are sounds we don’t notice,” Chan tells Galerie. He refers to the Chinese saying of “the biggest sounds are those you can hardly hear” to verbalize his relationship with sonic reverberations, which are, in fact, instrumental in the show’s three large-scale sculptures. A gem master for five decades, he has heard perhaps more than any other the sound of different stone materials’s reactions to his tools. A friction from a gentle touch on a piece of ruby sometimes speaks to Chan, or a dull tool’s noisy squeak may remind him of its need to be sharpened. “Listening to the materials is like looking,” he adds about his process. 

Whenever Chan finds himself in Venice—which is quite often for the Hong Kong resident—he listens to the water more than anything else. The feat is given for most stompers of the lagoon city, but for the artist, the aquatic musings resonate with the particular alchemy of titanium. He calls the show’s anchoring material “limitless” for its ability to “enter our bodies in the form of a tooth or become a rocket and travel to space.” This incredibly malleable nature of an otherwise challenging chemical yields the show’s intricately-orchestrated larger-than-life sculptures. Dazzling colors and meticulous parts, which total in thousands in each sculpture, beg for intimate inspections. The discoveries are ample in each encounter, including coiled coins, circular bits, and faces in various sizes and freely oozing likenesses. The distorted visages, in fact, make a nod to the bond Chan sees between water and titanium—“our reflections on water will never be the same, just like a moving mirror,” he says, “and similarly the reality is never still.”

Contemplation is never amiss in Chan’s output, and here, the fundamental foray into introspection is in the sculptures’s representation of mortality in different life cycles. The artist seeks help from colors to embody birth, growth, and rebirth in each sculpture. Yellow anchors the show-opener work in the long and narrow church, followed by a reddish form which alludes to the fiery youth. The finale towards the altar is blue, a color he associates with spirituality at the end of life.

A reckoning with life is a complex notion for Chan, who celebrates his 70th birthday this year. Besides Venice, the milestone also coincides with his upcoming show at Shanghai’s Long Museum, which will open in mid-July with sculptures similar in silhouette to those in Venice yet reaching as high as 32 feet in scale. Drawing an invisible line of sonic and emotional bond between two continents and cities is perhaps the artist’s most fundamental ambition in his golden year. The decision to leave his sculptures hollow indeed alludes to this desire. “They contain the space they inhabit,” he says and explains: “Here in Venice, the city’s air becomes a part of the vessel, and when they are exhibited outdoors in Shanghai, the sky over there will fill them.”

Turning 70 is more of a catalyst to connie to create than a retrospection for Chan. “I am grateful for all the years and the experience and knowledge they gave me,” he says. But the time he has left behind only fuels him for the future. “Seventy is not about aging,” he says, “it is about having more power and motivation to acquire more knowledge.”

“Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds” is on view at The Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, through October 18, 2026.