At M+ in Hong Kong, Oscar Chan Yik Long has turned one of Chinese mythology’s most formidable figures into a guide for living with fear. His newly commissioned mural, Fear Catcher, opened to the public on October 17 as part of Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia.
The site-specific work takes inspiration from Zhong Kui, often described as the King of Ghosts. In Chan’s interpretation, the figure is less a supernatural enforcer than a way to recognise fear and learn to release it. That shift is characteristic of an artist who uses mythology as an active visual language rather than as inherited illustration.
A mural built for a larger mythology
Chan, born in Hong Kong in 1988 and now working between Helsinki and Hong Kong, is known for immersive painted environments and drawings made primarily with ink. His work pulls from East Asian mythology, esoteric traditions, popular culture and art history, but resists the expectation that contemporary ink practice must repeat the conventions of traditional Chinese painting.
Fear Catcher enters an exhibition of more than 400 works spanning two centuries of fantasy across art, architecture, fashion, games and film. M+ presents the survey as the first major exhibition to examine fantasy in Asia alongside shifting social and political realities. Within that scale, Chan’s commission performs a specific task: it gives a historical deity a contemporary psychological function.
The mural’s site-specific form is important. A wall painting cannot be separated easily from the route, scale and duration of a museum visit. Instead of behaving like an autonomous object, it creates an environment. That makes the viewer’s body—and the act of moving through fear—part of the work’s meaning.
What artists can take from Chan’s approach
Chan’s commission shows how an artist can work with inherited symbols without treating them as fixed. The useful question is not whether a myth remains faithful to one historical version. It is whether the artist understands its structure deeply enough to make a responsible transformation.
For artists working across cultures, that distinction matters. Research provides the grounding; form provides the renewal. Chan’s practice connects regional memory with a vocabulary shaped by migration, contemporary visual culture and international exhibition contexts. The result does not abandon specificity in pursuit of universality. It reaches outward by staying precise.
The commission also illustrates the value of a strong conceptual sentence. “Recognising fear and learning to let it go” gives audiences an entry point without exhausting the image. Artists developing proposals for site-specific work can learn from that balance: the premise is clear enough for an institution to communicate, while the visual experience remains open.
Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia is on view at M+ through April 4, 2027.
