Shanghai, the subject of elsewhere

Shanghai. In the metropolis that, more than any other, has made transformation a defining feature of its identity, culture has in recent years ceased to be merely a commentary on the city’s remarkable economic development and has become one of its principal languages. The new Shanghai is thus also defined by its museums, galleries, foundations, biennials and major architectural projects. The West Bund is perhaps the place where this metamorphosis is most clearly evident, and we realise this as we walk along the western bank of the Huangpu River in the Xuhui district – once home to quays, warehouses and industrial plants – where one of Asia’s new art districts has emerged, with a concentration of cultural institutions that has reshaped the city’s cultural landscape. The promenade runs along the river, and the old industrial landscape has been gradually transformed into a landscape of the imagination, where, since 2014, the Long Museum West Bund has stood out on the site of the former Beipiao Wharf, an area once used for coal transport.

Architect Liu Yichun, of the Atelier Deshaus practice, has not erased that memory; indeed, the old coal-discharge structure remains, and surrounding it have sprung up the large concrete vaults – the so-called ‘vault-umbrellas’ – which lend the museum’s spaces an appearance that is both industrial and almost sacred. Here, everything has been put at the service of a different vision: to make art one of the driving forces behind the new Shanghai. This is not a museum isolated from the city, but a cultural institution open to its surroundings. It is within this austere and monumental architecture that Wallace Chan now presents his visions. The artist’s name will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Venice Biennale in recent years. A self-taught artist and sculptor, born in Hong Kong, Chan has already appeared on the Venetian scene on several occasions: ‘Titans’ in 2021, ‘Totem’ in 2022, and ‘Transcendence’ in 2024.

This year he is back with “Vessels of Other Worlds”, presented at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, and the project now finds its most expansive and spectacular form in Shanghai. At the Long Museum, in fact, scale changes everything. Three gigantic sculptures stand at seven, eight and ten metres tall, but the surprise lies not only in their proportions, because the artist – as he explains to Il Foglio during our preview visit – constructs “an almost initiatory journey through corridors, passageways and darker rooms, a sequence designed to delay the appearance of the major works”. “The visitor does not immediately enter the heart of the exhibition, because it reveals itself bit by bit until the final surprise, which has been prepared through a sort of suspension of the gaze,” he adds. “When the sculptures finally appear, they seem to belong to a world that does not entirely coincide with that of the museum. They are vases, it is true, but only in appearance, because they resemble bodies, architectural structures, fantastical organisms and containers for a substance that is also mental.” Chan calls them ‘Vessels of Other Worlds’, which is also the title of this exhibition, running until 25 October. Titanium – a material associated with technology, industry and the aerospace sector – loses the coldness of a metal alloy in his hands and becomes an iridescent surface, skin and light. Thousands of elements are assembled with the precision of a goldsmith (another of his professions; his creations on the ground floor are particularly impressive for their precision, as well as for the gemstones used), and human figures, mythological creatures, faces, babies, animals and traditional Chinese motifs appear on the surfaces. 

“This is the world I like to build – a special place where matter seems to hold onto the memory of what has been and, at the same time, open up to what we do not yet know,” he explains. “This is one of Chan’s most distinctive qualities: the disproportion between the meticulousness of the gesture and the grandeur of the result,” recalls James Putnam, the curator of this exhibition, which establishes a symbolic dialogue between Venice and Shanghai, exploring the themes of transformation, memory and spirituality through those monumental titanium sculptures that take centre stage alongside others in obsidian. “In my work, the monumental arises from the microscopic, just as stars arise from particles, mountains from dust and life from cells,” continues the artist, who began carving precious stones at the age of sixteen and has spent more than half a century exploring the nature of matter. At the Long Museum, these sculptures appear immense, but on closer inspection one discovers an almost dizzying wealth of detail. Titanium seems to absorb and reflect light; in the dim light, the surfaces glow and take on reflections that evoke something lunar and aquatic, even organic. The reference to water is no coincidence, for Venice and Shanghai are the two poles of this project – two cities born of their relationship with water and transformed by it into centres of exchange and trade.

In Venice, the sculptures encountered the intimate and spiritual atmosphere of the Cappella della Pietà, whilst in Shanghai they encounter the industrial vastness of the Long Museum and the river flowing immediately beyond its walls. In both cases, Chan asks us not merely to look at a sculpture, but to enter it mentally. The large central work contains a threshold leading into a kaleidoscopic interior. The Wallace Cut, the famous illusionist technique invented by the artist in 1987, multiplies the images, refracts them, renders them unstable, and the viewer’s movement alters what they see. The result is reminiscent of a dream: faces and bodies, figures and symbols can be recognised, but immediately afterwards the vision slips away and begins anew elsewhere, for this is a sculpture that cannot be fully grasped by a single glance. The most important one, at least there, is the one in Shanghai that continues to run along the Huangpu.