Taming fear: Oscar Chan Yik Long’s imaginary worlds at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, the LNMA  

Exhibition opening at 6 pm Thursday, 27 November, 2025

At 6 pm Thursday, 27 November the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, the LNMA, opens an exhibition They Always Look from an Imagined Above by the contemporary artist Oscar Chan Yik Long. In his project designed for Vilnius, the artist presents his recent and earlier work – paintings, drawings, sculpture, textile objects, and a temporary mural painted on a vault of the historic Radvila Palace. 

 

“We are happy for the opportunity to present, in partnership with Finland and Switzerland, a rising figure of the international art scene. Anchored in his formative Chinese culture, Oscar Chan Yik Long explores the intersections of East Asian and Western religious beliefs and art traditions. He fills up the spaces of Ravila Palace with his phantasmagorical images, inviting to discover his art and through it to explore our own emotions,” Justina Augustytė, director of the Radvila Palace Museum of Art invites to see the exhibition.

 

 

The artist illuminating the images of the subconscious

 

Oscar Chan Yik Long is an artist from Hong Kong, currently based in Helsinki. His predominant medium is site-specific painting installations. He has recently been named ‘one of five Asian painters redefining figuration today’ by the art promotion website artnet.com.  Chan’s practice marries East Asian mythology and spiritual religious systems with the motifs of Western spiritual practices, while the traditional Chinese painting in ink, commonly associated with idyllic landscapes, serves to him as a means to unleash imagination and look into the inner world of fears, premonitions and the deep layers of the subconscious.

 

Instead of adhering to the conventions of traditional Chinese painting, the artist crafts his own visual language and the world of symbols. The colours black and white are sufficient for Chan – salt-smelling Chinese ink and white paper, cloth, or plastered wall are united by water to open up a plethora of images. The meaning in his works is generated by painterly gestures, image prompts and ambivalent figures every time playing out a different story.

 

“In contrast to most artists of his generation, Chan does not prop-up his pieces by carefully structed narratives, which have to be retold in due sequence. His practice celebrates and presupposes an open-ended, co-creative interaction with different audiences, both, children and art connoisseurs,” the curator of the exhibition Anders Kreuger says.

 

Chan is not afraid of seeming illustrative and enlists formats such as the playing card, picture book and similar. He references ample cultural phenomena, Japanese manga and animation, horror films by different cultures and countries, the dark side of the history of Western art. The artist employs these images to talk about natural human emotions, fear, anger, sadness, joy. Figurativeness to Chan is a way to remind that Latin “illustrate” means “to illuminate”, to unveil things usually covered in darkness. The horror in his artwork gradually transforms into a realization of the influence of our previous lives, ultimately leading to redemption or at least its possibility.

 

 

Site-specific mural created for the Radvila Palace opens the imagined above

 

By entering the worlds of just two colours black and white, visitors will have to forget all other colours for a short while. The first museum solo by Chan invites for an intimate encounter with his artistic universe, centred around a temporary mural installation he creates for the space of the museum.

 

“Working in a new space of the museum is inevitably challenging, but these situations validate the main themes of my art – fear and anxiety. The process of painting turns into an active dialogue with the place by thinking of it and getting the feel of it, adjusting to it, responding to its uniqueness, and letting it shape my work,” the artist puts his artistic process in words.

 

The entire exhibition is titled after this particular piece painted on one of the vaults in the rooms of the Radvila Palace, They Always Look from the Imagined Above (2025). Who “they” are, remains to be guessed, just as why the “above” is “imagined”, though in fact viewer can see it over their head. This intentional ambiguity manifests the principle of Chan’s art. There is room left for the viewer’s imagination, his pieces are there not for just looking at them, they include and invite to become co-narrators of the stories, learning about oneself through art. Facing fear, the unknown, or other primeval emotions becomes a process of taming them, a slow metamorphosis of anxiety into understanding, of darkness into light.

 

The exhibition They Always Look from the Imagined Above will be expanded by tours, creative workshops, education events, including Saturday, 29 November exhibition tour by the artist (in English). Please go to the LNMA website and social media for events info. The exhibition at the Radvila Palace will run till 15 March, 2026.

 

 

Team of Oscar Chan Yik Long’s exhibition They Always Look from the Imagined Above:

 

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: the LNMA Pranas Gudynas Conservation Centre, Stefan Lorenzutti and Joanna Osiewicz-Lorenzutti (Bored Wolves), Vadim Šamkov.

 

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Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 250 5824

See also

Exhibition

Oscar Chan Yik Long: They always look from an imagined above