Oscar Chan Yik Long: They always look from an imagined above
27 November 2025 – 15 March 2026
Oscar Chang Yik Long (Hong Kong, 1988, lives in Helsinki) was recently named ‘one of five Asian painters redefining figuration today’ by the art promotion website artnet.com. And it is true that his painting – mostly figurative, mostly executed in Chinese ink, mostly based on motifs from East Asian mythology or other esoteric traditions – must be touching some nerve in viewers today, because it is increasingly featured in galleries, kunsthalles and museums throughout Europe and Asia.
His first solo exhibition in a museum consists of both new and existing works. It is conceived as a visual journey through four high-ceilinged rooms on the ground floor of a seventeenth-century palace in central Vilnius, built by the fabulously rich magnates of the Radvila (Radziwiłł) family, that is now one of the branches of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art.
The exhibition’s title also names a temporary ink mural in the vaulted ceiling of one of these rooms, They always look from an imagined above (2025). We don’t necessarily understand who ‘they’ are or where they come from, and Chan is not telling us. Nor is he letting us know why the ‘above’ is ‘imagined’ (and at the same time clearly visible in the vault). Under the mural he has placed Cosmic egg (2021), a soft black-and-white woollen rug. It alludes to a creation myth, but again without explicating it. An adjacent smaller space has been darkened. Its walls and ceilings receive the projected work Patrol (2025), based on a set of ink drawings on paper where ‘they’ – rudimentary figures evoking human skeletons – make another unexplained appearance.
Unlike many artists of his generation, Chan doesn’t back his work up with meticulous narratives that must be dutifully retold. Instead, his images celebrate, even presuppose, open-ended co-creation with varied audiences, explicitly including both children and connoisseurs of painting. There is figuration, but as viewers we are invited to stray from it. We begin to sense the meaning behind Chan’s images by sensing his painterly gestures and responding to his condensed image prompts. There is storytelling, but the story often finds itself displaced by the flow of improvisation and the abundance of figures in action.
Such gestural figuration is centre-stage in The earthly branches (2025), a series of twelve ink paintings on stretched canvases sized after Chan’s own physical body (each 180 × 65 cm) and doubling as expressive variations of the Chinese zodiac signs: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. In another reference to East Asian tradition, the paintings are connected to each other by iron hinges to form free-standing folding screens.
Condensation and displacement – both prominent in these contemporary partition walls with their simultaneous embrace of rawness and sophistication – are not innocent artistic strategies for seeking and holding attention. They are, as we remember, hallmarks of the Freudian Unconscious. Chan’s images are not benign or soothing. He bases much of his work on primeval emotions like the fear of violence and our fascination with them. He references cultural phenomena like Japanese manga and animation, horror movies from a variety of countries and cultures, also the darker recesses of Western art history.
The ten-part ink painting I look at my own dead body (2025, each canvas 30 × 100 cm) is a stretched-out landscape-like rendering of a skeleton stripped of all perishable body tissue. The source image is a French eighteenth-century engraving, but the original vision came to Chan in a dream where he observed his own dead body laid out on display in a European museum. When viewed at a steep angle, the combined canvases become almost anamorphic and reveal the skeleton with chilling anatomical accuracy, captured as if reclining on a stone slab.
The true face of Chan’s work is one that allows horror to transform into understanding – of, say, how we may be driven by what happened to us in previous lives – and ultimately to redemption, or at least its possibility. It is no coincidence that the reading of ambiguous visual cues as signs of things to come or explications of a deeply submerged past, or in other words divination, is at the heart of his interest in mythology and ink painting. Along with imagination and fabulation, it should be said. These three creative strategies are connected in the fundamentally human drive to produce fiction.
Chan uses them to form an active approach to the visual that is unafraid of seeming illustrative and indeed actively enlists formats such as the playing card or the picture book. The series Tarot cards (Major Arcana) (2025, 22 drawings, each ca 42 × 29.7 cm) is a reinterpretation of the modern tarot deck as it was established around the turn of the last century. It reduces the number of narrative details, focuses on a few key significant image prompts and experiments with ink and white marker on brownish paper.
For his first artist book, My body is a reincarnated population (Kraków: Bored Wolves, 2024), Chan produced 88 drawings (each ca 42 × 29.7 cm) that are all related to his internal organs and extremities. The number of drawings dedicated to each body part and his relationship with them in past lives were decided by throwing a dice marked with his own emblematic visual symbols for six types of bonds. Had he and his organs been friends, lovers, enemies, parents, siblings or relatives? Selected drawings from the book (which also contains short texts by Chan in Chinese and English) will be displayed throughout the exhibition.
In the end, illustration is just another word for illumination: casting light on what would otherwise remain shrouded in darkness. Chan operates with black (ink, with its salty smell) and white (paper, primed canvas or plastered wall, with their chalky dryness). By adding water, he makes these seeming opposites sing together in ways that all but eliminate our need for other colours. To join his visual journey through the Radvila Palace is to forget that need for a moment.
Only one work reminds us directly of the riotously polychrome world outside. The king of ghosts (2021, alloy metal, resin and plastic, 45 × 34 × 13 cm) is a figurine, factory-made in an edition of 100, visualising a Chinese legend invoked by its title. It reminds us that those we might be afraid of (the ghosts in their kingdom) are, in turn, afraid of someone (their king) or something – which may very well be fear itself.
Curator Anders Kreuger
Coordinator Nojus Kiznis
Graphic Designer Domantas Pigulevičius
Architect Aleksandras Kavaliauskas
Translator Paulius Balčytis
Organiser The Radvila Palace Museum of Art
Partners: Kunsthalle Kohta, PF25 Cultural Projects
Sponsor Finnish Cultural Foundation
Special thanks to: Pranas Gudynas Conservation Center, Stefan Lorenzutti, Joanna Osiewicz-Lorenzutti (Bored Wolves), Vadim Šamkov
- Purchase an e-ticket for this exhibition
- Book a guided tour of this exhibition by phone +370 616 16550, email radvilos.ekskursijos@lndm.lt
- Plan your visit to the Radvila Palace Museum of Art
Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 250 5824
