This North Point Bathhouse Isn’t What You Expect

To contemplate the art of Chan Wai-lap is to immerse yourself in the colour blue. Chan is best known for using coloured pencils to create immaculate drawings of swimming pools that he painstakingly recreates tile by tile. Some of his pools are round, some rectangular, some deep, some shallow, some Olympic-sized, some little bigger than a bathtub — but they are almost all vividly, luminously blue. 

So it’s a shock to walk into his latest installation and feel bathed in pink. “I’m using reds, pinks, purples,” says the artist, looking around almost in disbelief at one of the galleries he has taken over at Oi!, the art space on Oil Street in North Point. “I’m making a very different view for the audience, and for my storytelling.” 

While there is much to admire in the technical mastery of Chan’s art, it’s the stories he embeds in his work that he hopes leave a lasting impact on visitors. His meticulous gridded drawings evoke the rhythm of swimming laps, while the absence of people in his pools evokes the tranquillity you might find by diving underwater and sinking into silence. 

In 2023, Chan told a more complex story when he was commissioned by the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) to build his first 3D swimming pool, which was erected on the edge of Victoria Harbour. The installation was filled with details that prompted reflections on the architecture of pools and their roles as gathering spaces for people from all walks of life. Pools, Chan’s work highlighted, are complex places that can be sites of solitude and connection, vulnerability and belonging, and awkwardness and joy.

Out of the pool

Chan’s new exhibition at Oi! expands on these themes. On his first trip to Oi!, before he had any concrete ideas for his exhibition, he was struck by the gallery’s glass block walls, which reminded him of showers and changing rooms. 

Around the same time, Chan rediscovered a viral news story from late 2016. University of Nottingham researchers had discovered a brown garden snail in a London backyard with a genetic quirk: its shell curled left, rather than the normal right. This anomaly meant the snail, which was nicknamed Jeremy after the leftwing politician Jeremy Corbyn, couldn’t mate with most of his species. 

The BBC issued a callout for people to find a “lefty” mate for Jeremy, sending thousands of Brits digging through their gardens looking for another one-in-a-million snail. The search soon went international and two possible matches were brought to Nottingham. Roughly a year later, one of them produced Jeremy’s offspring. 

Jeremy’s plight, Chan felt, was like that of many singletons in Hong Kong. Living in a bustling city means you are surrounded by thousands of potential partners, but it can be hard to find the person you fit with. All of us, like Jeremy, have our own unique combination of needs. Jeremy’s plight was overcome by good Samaritans who found a way to introduce the snail to prospective love interests. What if, Chan wondered, he could do the same thing for Hongkongers? 

“That’s why I’m using all the reds, pinks and purples,” Chan says. “This exhibition is all about love.”

Raising a smile

Chan understands that using a snail as an image for those on the hunt for love might be seen as eccentric, or possibly even ridiculous. He is quick to laugh at his work, and he hopes visitors will laugh at it too. In fact, that’s the point.

“Humour is very important,” he says. “I became an artist because I don’t want to sit in an office and have 8am to 6pm working hours, then go home. If I can make something that makes people feel in a different way through my artwork, and see a different way of the world, that’s what I want. Without humour, life is not easy in this world.” 

For Chan, the humour begins before people even arrive at the exhibition, which is called Jeremy’s Bathhouse. “People will think, ‘Oh my God, North Point opened a bathhouse suddenly? Let me go to have a look — is it really a bathhouse business or not?” says Chan. “I want people to have very big questions, then come here to find the answer.”

The answer awaiting visitors is not immediately clear because, in many ways, Chan has created a real-life bathhouse. The first gallery you walk into is a reception area complete with dressing gowns hanging on the wall. From there, visitors are directed along an outdoor walkway and into a tiled room with four shower cubicles, a heart-shaped plunge pool and an onsen-like area with a seated shower. It has everything you would expect from a bathhouse except running water. Even if the exhibition doesn’t make you laugh, the incongruence of finding this fantasy spa inside a gallery is likely to elicit at least a smile, or possibly a raised eyebrow. 

There were several reasons why Chan chose a bathhouse as the subject for this exhibition. Oi!’s glass block walls got him thinking about showers, which led him to consider the similarities and differences between swimming and bathing, and pools and bathhouses. 

He was particularly interested in how people’s behaviour changed across the sites. Swimming, he says, is often done solo. In contrast, bathhouses in many cultures, including hammams in Turkey and onsens in Japan, are community spaces where people go with friends or family. In some countries, there is a culture of bathhouses as cruising sites, particularly for queer men. All these factors made a bathhouse a fitting venue for Chan to reflect on dating, relationships and love.

A group effort

Like swimming laps, drawing is a solitary activity for Chan. In contrast, the making of Jeremy’s Bathhouse was a collaborative exercise, which is fitting for an exhibition about bringing people together. Chan enlisted Human Wu, the director of Human Architects and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, as the exhibition designer. 

Wu had previously worked with Lap on his swimming pool outside the HKMoA, but Jeremy’s Bathhouse was a bigger technical challenge. Chan’s swimming pool was made with tiles from Italian brand Bisazza, whereas Chan designed every tile for the bathhouse himself, working with Wu to finetune the colours and textures. They were then made by craftsmen in Jingdezhen, the home of ceramics manufacturing in China.  

On top of the thousands of tiles from Jingdezhen, Chan also worked with one of his contemporaries, the Hong Kong artist Hilarie Hon, to create some larger, one-off tiles that he painted himself, decorating them with hearts and snails. These act as a pleasing reminder of Chan’s own hand and background in drawing amid the larger works that have been made with the help of craftspeople and machines. 

Other ceramic details hint at other ideas. Chan has clad the edges of some steps with eye-shaped tiles that stare back at you. Eyes also appear in a neon sign hanging in the entrance, which Chan made with the help of Hong Kong artist Jive Lau, founder of Kowloneon (who is featured in the latest Zolima Culture Guide, Neon Is Not Dead). This repetition of eyes prompts reflection on what you might see in a bathhouse, or the ways in which you might be seen, adding a welcome dash of tension to a space that might otherwise feel uniformly cheerful. 

To Chan, the level of nudity in a bathhouse means they might make some people feel uneasy, just as putting yourself out there to meet a possible partner can be uncomfortable. Bathhouses are “more intimate” than a pool, he says. “I think it’s more fitting for talking about a love story.”

Global reach

While elements of the exhibition hint at the awkwardness of building relationships, Chan also highlights that bathing — and falling in love — is a universal experience. He has clad the shower cubicles in grids of unevenly matched capsules. Look closely and you’ll see they are casts of dozens of varieties of bars of soap. 

“I collected these soaps from all around the world,” says Chan, who has visited bathhouses around the world, including in Japan, Turkey and Hungary. “Before we made the moulds, I got some water and used my hands to use the soaps first, each one. So you can see the shape is not so perfect.” 

Chan’s combination of his literally personal touch with a universal object like a bar of soap reveals how this exhibition encompasses both private and shared experiences. Throughout the show, there are subtle details that might encourage connection, including a mirror that is tilted to show you a reflection of the person next to you, rather than yourself, and a tricky shoe rack that has holes built for only one shoe at a time. Visitors are required to take off their shoes — but no other clothes — before stepping into the main area of the bathhouse. Having to store their footwear in different slots might lead to a meet-cute with other gallery-goers as everyone searches for compartments. 

Jeremy’s Bathhouse is just one of several projects Chan is unveiling in March. He is featured in Live: A Hong Kong Art Exhibition, a group show at the HKMoA, and his swimming pool drawings are being displayed on billboards around the city advertising this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong. He has also been commissioned by UBS to create a circular pool for the UBS Art Studio at the fair. The work is titled Mimimomo Pool after the Cantonese phrase 靡靡摩摩 (mei5 mei5 mo1 mo1) which roughly translates as “slowly, slowly.” The pool has eight neck massagers built into its walls, so Chan hopes it will encourage fairgoers to pause and take a break during the frenzy of Art Basel. 

Also at the fair, Chan is making a new work for the booth of the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT). The installation refers to some of the earliest works Chan produced after he had left university, when he worked as part of the art collective Dirty Paper and made drawings about school life in Hong Kong. Chan’s new work will feature uniforms he has collected from around the city, creating an archive of a slice of the city’s design history and evoking memories for many locals. 

Like Jeremy’s Bathhouse, Chan’s work for CHAT reveals his growing ambition. He is pushing himself to expand his art off the page, and to work at increasingly large scales. He does not know what he’ll make next, but he wants to keep making spaces that encourage people to reflect on the world around them. “At the beginning, my art was about my own life,” he says. “Now, it has transformed into how I can connect with strangers, and how visitors can use my art to connect to other things.” 

Jeremy’s Bathhouse runs at Oi! from 19 March to 30 August 2026. Click here for more information.