Artist Pak-Keung Wan was born in Hong Kong in 1970 and immigrated to the UK in 1988 for his further art education, eventually enrolling as a postgraduate at London's Royal College of Art. Encompassing drawing, installation, photography, printmaking, and performance, he is inspired by celestial phenomena and the interplay between science and art. His work explores themes of temporality, existence, and creation, merging the cosmic with the intimate.
Artist Pak-Keung Wan was born in Hong Kong in 1970. Following a foundation year at Nene College, Northampton (1988-89), he earned his BA from the West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham (1989-92), before enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London (1992–94), where he completed his MA in Fine Art Printmaking, with the support of a prestigious Henry Moore Scholarship. This period not only honed his technical skills but also instilled a deep-seated ‘print-consciousness’ in him, which has become a hallmark of his artistic vocabulary (Rise Art). This consciousness is not merely about the techniques of printmaking but encompasses a broader engagement with materials and processes, exploring their limits, interactions, and the potential for transformation and transmutation.
Spanning drawing, installation, photography, printmaking, and performance, Wan's work is characterised by profound engagement with the processes of creation and the temporalities they inhabit. His practice embodies a meditation on transmutation and temporality, where the act of making becomes a conduit for exploring broader existential and metaphysical themes. Wan's engagement is deeply reflective, often employing self-imposed rules and constraints that echo his printmaking background and martial arts practice. This discipline allows him to navigate within and beyond the boundaries of materials and mediums, exploring the freedom that comes from constraint and the potential for new forms of expression and understanding. Drawing, for Wan, is not just a technique but a mode of engagement with the world, a way to explore the interconnections between self, material, and the cosmos. His interest in science further enriches this exploration, as seen in his exhibitions at venues including the Williamsville Space Lab Planetarium in New York and the Stardome Observatory & Planetarium in Auckland, New Zealand. These locations underscore his commitment to intertwining the scientific with the artistic, offering viewers a lens through which to explore complex concepts of space, time, and existence.
Wan's In Papyro series, begun in 2006, offers a poignant exploration of personal and universal themes. Originating from his and his wife's experiences trying to conceive, it embodies drawing as an act of invocation and creation, a ‘visual spell’, in the artist’s own words, where the line becomes a metaphorical umbilical cord connecting the artist's inner world with the canvas's potential for life (Jungle 2017). This approach to drawing, where each line must return to its starting point before extending again, underscores Wan's philosophical engagement with creation, continuity, and the cycles of life. Wan's ongoing series Lune, begun in 2009, epitomises his intricate and immersive drawing style, taking inspiration from NASA's documentation of solar eclipses. Comprising 1133 drawings, this project explores the sensual and metaphysical aspects of drawing, employing the solar eclipse as a metaphor for unseen forces and connections that shape our world perception. Beyond highlighting Wan's fascination with celestial phenomena, this body of work reflects on drawing as a performative and expansive act that bridges the known and the unknown. Arts writer Robert Clark described Wan’s drawings as ‘exquisite elliptical universes. Neither purely abstract nor recognisably figurative, each image is testimony to its own meticulously controlled yet almost playfully improvised process of creation’ (Clark 2007). The series significantly expanded during Wan's 'Some Times' residency at The Art House, Wakefield in July 2017, which marked the beginning of new explorations in photography, specifically through the works In Obscura (2017). Here, Wan experimented with creating photograms by arranging translucent materials inside a large-format film camera, capturing the ethereal essence of creation and gestation. This approach mirrored the conceptual framing of the eclipse as a cosmic shutter, blurring the boundaries between the celestial and the corporeal. In his installation Adrift on the Sea of Fertility (2017), Wan examined the concept of writer's block, drawing parallels between this state of wordlessness and infertility. Through the meticulous process of sanding off the ink from pages of a contemporary mass circulation magazine like Vogue, he transformed the material into a powder, creating a miniature 'lunar' landscape that serves as a metaphor for the barren interior landscapes of infertility and creative block. This work, inspired by George Gissing's novel New Grub Street, reflects on the challenges of adapting to changing social and market forces, and the concept of 'dumbing down' in literature. Installed in a museum cabinet, it captures a sense of time arrested, evoking the unchanging surface of the moon and the internal landscapes of those consumed by wordlessness.
Wan's solo shows include Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham ( 2001); Ellipsis, G1 Gallery, Solihull Arts Complex (2011); and On why some things form and other things don't, The Art House (2017). Wan's teaching posts include Birmingham Metropolitan College (2007–15), Nottingham Trent University (2001–06), and University of Northampton, among others. His artist's residencies include The Usher Gallery, Lincoln (2004) and New Art Gallery Walsall (2012). He is currently based in Birmingham. Pak-Keung Wan's work is not currently represented in UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Pak-Keung Wan]
Publications related to [Pak-Keung Wan] in the Ben Uri Library