Light is the Binding Element

Wallace Chan was suffering from a terrible headache 30 years ago during a trip to Tibet. He began hearing music. “I knew it was playing in my head and no one else could hear it,” he tells Family Style. When James Putnam, the curator of Chan’s new exhibition, “Transcendence” in Venice, introduced him to a score by Brian Eno, he artist and jewelry-designer immediately remembered his sonic experience in the Himalayas—Chan found his show’s soundscape. 

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Inside the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, Chan’s four large-scale titanium sculptures are suspended from the ceiling while Eno’s moody tunes fill the long narrow venue by the water. The quartet of faces hold horrified Munchian expressions, some of which are cracked open on their backs while others have large crater eyes. Despite the material’s bullet-strong nature, they ooze, submitting to the gravity inside the dimly-lit holy space. The sculptures’ expressions inhabit an eerie place between awe and terror. Their largely-gaped mouths are indeed invitations to place our heads inside to hear the titanium’s echoes. The medley of durability and hollowness is what Chan considers “a Yin and Yang in sculpture to create sound,” he says. The experience strips the listener off of the Venetian chaos and absorbs them into an echo chamber which the artist explains as “a micro universe with voices from afar or even from ancient times.” 

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Similar to the Hong Kong-based artist’s play with malleability and firmness through titanium, he attributes an almost tangible nature to sound: the reverberation not only penetrates through our ears but it also wraps our faces. “It is not only your ears that you can hear with,” Chan adds, “your skin, your back, and top of your head can hear, too.” The alchemy between molten and solid gives the faces a kinetic potential which the artist thinks, “highlights the transience of life, just like the faces which seem to be constantly changing.” Besides their aloof expressions, the visages are also devoid of any markers of age or gender. “I wanted to find faces that do not exist in reality,” he says.

Chan has indeed been traversing different textures and sensations throughout his five-decade career. After starting as a gemstone carver at age sixteen in 1973, he invented the three-dimensional carving technique known as the Wallace Cut. MFA Boston, the Capital Museum of China, the British Museum, and Shanghai’s Long Museum hold some of his carved gemstone works. His current show completes a trilogy of Venice projects that started in 2021 at Fondaco Marcello with TITANS, a large-scale installation, ensued by the following year with TOTEM, which included a 32-foot floor sculpture at the same venue. Transcendence stems from Chan’s search for a “higher self through making.” Sculpture and jewelry demand different materials and techniques with distinct but pliable knowledge. “I can apply the techniques I have for jewelry in sculpture or help sculpting inform me in gems,” he says. Light is the binding element in both practices. “I have to pay attention to how light interacts with sculpture,” explains Chan, who has gained this skill through observing the way illumination goes through gems. 

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Titanium found Chan through a search for lightness and heft in sculpture. Gold was his first material for exploration, “but I already knew it was too heavy for the body to wear or be around,” he admits. An article about titanium pacemakers led to the realization that the material is indeed one fifth of gold in weight. Challenges however were also on his way: “titanium is light and durable but it is very difficult to tame because of its really high melting point and if you bend it, titanium will bounce back,” he explains. The material’s compatibility with the body is the main allure. “Your body feels the titanium in your bones and muscles; it becomes a part of you,” says Chan. The sculptures are a result of an eight-year effort at his Hong Kong and Macau studios to give titanium a marble-like smoothness and what Chan calls “a silky softness in touch.” 

Pushing his scale to larger extents resulted from the artist’s practice of a Chinese saying that suggests, “everything big and small is infinite.” Whether a massive titanium face or a tiny gemstone, he focuses on the material’s infinity in its microscopic nature. “A minuscule size piece of jewelry and a large sculpture have the same size atom in their core,” he says. As a traveler between gems and titanium, Chan also commits to a liberty to change between micro and macro worlds in size. 

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Chan had fallen in love with Venice long before he stepped foot to the city. As a 12-year old, he would visit a Hong Kong restaurant named after it, where the fresh bread and milk tea combination was a rare treat whenever his family could afford it. Only decades later, he heard about Venice—the city—when he visited Art Basel. “I always allow myself to get lost along the canals after so many times here,” he says, “because in Venice, I am always in a state of meditation.” 

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“Wallace Chan: Transcendence” is on view until September 30, 2024. atthe Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà at the Venice Biennale at Giardini, Venice.