What is Oscar Chan Yik-long Doing in Lithuania?

While preparing for his current exhibition at Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, the artist Oscar Chan Yik-long had a disturbing dream. “I was in a white cube museum, I don’t know where, and I saw a huge skeleton in front of me,” he says. “My whole size was half that of the feet of the skeleton. I walked along the whole body, thinking, ‘What is this skeleton?’ In the end, I saw the face — it was me.” 

This story might not be surprising to those who are familiar with Chan’s work. Many of his lively ink paintings are portals into dark worlds populated with devils, ghosts and other monstrous creatures taken from East Asian and Western mythology and horror films. These shadowy canvases are perhaps best understood as attempts to decode fear. As viewers study Chan’s gruesome scenes, they might discover one particular beast in his cast of characters that makes their hair stand on end, or a specific scene that makes their stomach drop, giving them insight into their own subconscious. For Chan, the making of the works is a chance to exorcise his own terror. 

The artist has been wrestling with fear for most of his life. In childhood, he faced a series of health crises, including life-saving emergency brain surgery at the age of 10. These experiences left Chan battling anxiety and gave him a visceral understanding of humanity’s physical and psychological vulnerabilities. 

Chan’s nightmarish canvases have now been exhibited around the world.  In his hometown of Hong Kong, he is represented by Gallery Exit and has had his work featured in exhibitions such as Myth Makers-Spectrosynthesis III at Tai Kwun and in the upcoming Muted Hums, which is opening at Para Site on 13 December. Since Chan moved to Europe in 2019 — first to Paris, then to his current home of Helsinki — he has also received increasing attention internationally. Earlier this year, he unveiled his exhibition To Sleep and Wake Unafraid at PF25 cultural projects in Switzerland, the first of a two-part show that is now continuing at Radvila Palace.

This second chapter, titled They Always Look from an Imagined Above, marks a new milestone for Chan because it is his first solo show in a museum. “This museum show gave me a big space — physical space, but also the imaginative space to try something new and just explore possibilities,” he says. 

Beyond the canvas 

Speaking to Chan, you would not guess that he was the person behind his art. In conversation, he is warm and thoughtful. He often dresses in bright colours, layering patterns to create kaleidoscopic outfits that offer a striking contrast to his dark paintings. At the time of writing, he is in the final days of installing They Always Look from an Imagined Above and seems excited, rather than nervous, about the show.

Like many of Chan’s exhibitions, this one features a site-specific work painted directly on to the gallery walls. The biggest challenge in the days ahead for Chan is finishing a mural he is painting on the inside of a more-than-50-square-metre dome. “So far I’m doing something a bit astrological,” he says. “There’s a sun, there’s a moon, there’s some birds.” 

But he doesn’t know exactly what he’ll paint next. “Hitchcock, when he filmed his movies, the most boring time for him was actually the filming because in his brain, every scene had already been created — he just needed to film it in reality,” says Chan. “I don’t want to have that feeling in my exhibitions. I also want the space to be involved, especially a historical space like this. The space can give me inspiration.” Sometimes it’s a building’s history that inspires Chan, or the culture of the city a gallery is in, or sometimes it’s the architectural details of the room. At Radvila Palace, he is converting one triangular piece of cornicing into a bird’s beak. 

Ink painting

Another reason it’s challenging for Chan to map out his site-specific paintings in advance is because, for the past decade, he has worked almost exclusively in Chinese ink. Ink can’t be reworked and revised in the same way as oil paint, so requires confident, fluid brushstrokes and a level of spontaneity. 

People often assume that Chan works with the material because he wants his work to be part of the millennia-spanning lineage of Chinese ink painting, which he disputes. “I’m not following any real Chinese painting legacy,” he says. He has not undergone traditional training of copying historic ink works, and uses unorthodox brushes to make his work. He was initially more drawn to ink for practical reasons: its quick-drying qualities matched his fast pace of work. 

However, a recent conversation with the curator Els Silvrants-Barclay has made Chan aware that he does not stand outside of the tradition of Chinese ink painting. In historic shanshui landscapes, artists painted paths to guide viewers’ eyes through the work. Silvrants-Barclay suggested to Chan that while he does not do that in individual paintings, he does do it in the galleries themselves. “I always try to create a spatial experience that I think slightly resembles what [traditional] Chinese painters try to do,” says Chan. “It’s sort of unconscious.” 

The mural at Radvila Palace is one example of Chan creating a spatial experience beyond hanging canvases on a wall. At Para Site, Chan is planning to transform the space by showing a projection. 

Moving images 

Chan’s experiments with projection build upon “Out on a Limb,” a work he made earlier this year featuring short, stop motion animations he made using his ink paintings. Working with moving images seems like a natural step for Chan, who has long been fascinated by cinema. Alongside his signature paintings of monsters and spirits, he has made works recreating stills from films, and used lines from scripts as his exhibition titles. 

“I watched quite a lot of movies in Hong Kong, but what really got me into movies is when I moved to Paris,” says Chan. He immersed himself in the city’s renowned cinephile culture and became interested in film history. Since then, films have given him both conceptual ideas and occasional practical pointers. 

Chan is particularly interested in horror films made between the 1950s and 1990s. In that period, filmmakers had to physically build sets and costumes, rather than relying on CGI. “It’s kind of like painting in the cinema,” says Chan. “It’s fascinating to see how people worked in order to get a creature to explode, or get a lighting effect to create a dangerous feeling.”

Living with fear 

While Chan is still using his art to explore fear, his own relationship with the emotion has changed over time. “I don’t believe art is functional or needs to have a function, but art has helped me to have a conversation with myself,” he says. “I can have fear, I can have anxiety, but that doesn’t mean I have to force myself to feel scared to make the artwork.”

Perhaps this personal growth is best seen in Chan’s reflection on his nightmare about discovering his own gigantic skeleton exhibited in a museum. He did some research about the dream, including asking ChatGPT to analyse it. “It said [the skeleton] is the old me, and I’m becoming a new me,” he says. “The old me is dying and the heavy burden is going away.” 

As someone who has experienced unpredictable ups and downs with his physical and mental health throughout his life, Chan is not suggesting anything as trite as the possibility that he might be entering a fresh chapter, or experiencing a new dawn. “I actually feel like every day is a new chapter,” he says. “In my ten years as an artist, the art has pushed me to reflect on myself. It has helped me grow as myself, but has also helped me grow in my artwork. I’m now more confident in expressing myself in my art than I have been before.” 

Muted Hums runs from 13 December 2025 to 22 February 2026 at Para Site.

They Always Look from an Imagined Above runs until 15 March 2026 at Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius.