Wallace Chan has enlarged the jeweller’s problem until a setting becomes architecture and the interior of a gemstone becomes a room. The question is no longer how to hold a stone against the body. It is how to make a body feel small without making attention small with it.
Vessels of Other Worlds, curated by James Putnam, unfolds between the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice (8 May–18 October 2026) and Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai (18 July–25 October). The dual exhibition marks Chan’s seventieth year with titanium sculptures that rise as high as ten metres.
A stone turned inside out
Chan began as a gemstone carver at sixteen. In 1987 he invented the Wallace Cut, carving a reversed image into the back of a stone so internal reflections multiply the face within it. He later developed methods for titanium and a highly durable porcelain. Each innovation begins with the same habit: ask matter to reveal a space it appears not to contain.
That patience belongs beside the stubborn intelligence of the visible hand and Jongjin Park’s layered material illusions. Technique is not backstage support. It is the thought made load-bearing.
Titanium learns to breathe
In Venice, three vessels inspired by the Church’s sacred oils occupy the chapel, surrounded by suspended forms like drops in motion. Video screens connect them to their monumental counterparts in Shanghai. Water links the two cities; light makes the industrial metal appear to fold, billow and float.
Birth, the first work in the series, stands seven metres high and weighs 4.6 tonnes. Its body contains more than 5,500 titanium parts, 1,500 aluminium components, nearly 20,000 screws, 725 gears and 922 human figures. Such numbers usually advertise engineering. Here they describe something closer to jewellery logic: invisible structure enabling visible wonder.
The danger of magnificence
Chan’s press is overwhelmingly admiring and often written through the language of luxury. That matters. Monumental scale can turn craftsmanship into evidence of expenditure, and spiritual vocabulary can become a soft light cast over sheer cost. Awe is among the easiest emotions for wealth to commission.
The works must therefore survive a harder test than splendour. Do they reward approach after the first astonishment? Do ten metres preserve the concentration once held inside thirteen centimetres? As Sebastian Errazuriz knows, an object becomes an argument only when it refuses to finish at appearance.
A jewel for space
Chan has described sculpture as jewellery for space. The phrase could sound inflated; in these exhibitions it is useful because it retains the responsibilities of the smaller form. A jewel must manage weight, balance, skin, movement and light at intimate distance. Enlargement should not release the maker from any of them.
The strongest vessels do not simply magnify rarity. They turn microscopic habits outward: the hidden joint, the travelling reflection, the void held inside a structure. Luxury survives the change of scale only where attention does. Chan’s monument is convincing when it still behaves, somewhere deep within its tonnes of titanium, like a stone being carefully turned in the hand.