On Saturday, 11 February at 4pm, artist Oscar Chan Yik Long will discuss his new zine of ink drawings, Melted Stars, with Bored Wolves publisher Stefan Lorenzutti.

Their conversation will range across Chan’s haptic practice, approach to spatiality and graphic influences contemporary and ancient, with a specific focus on his Melted Stars process of splashing ink on paper, intuiting mythological creatures in the murk, and rapidly drawing them into being a moment before they are extinguished.

Bored Wolves is a publisher of artist’s and poet’s books based in Kraków, Poland, and dedicated to collaborating across borders and languages, mediums and disciplines, in the process of developing publications that weave together categories often kept separate.

In the case of Melted Stars – which Chan immersed himself in over the course of 72 hours, delving into the ink and the far reaches of his imagination – the exhilarating challenge was to establish a zine structure for his astral choreographies fast enough to strike while the iron was hot.

In his own words:

‘I splash ink on paper. Then I follow my hands, letting them do their thing. As I observe the result, my mind searches for a face. From the face I sense a creature. I develop this creature. Really I work with the splash. It’s already decided once the splash is done.’

Oscar Chan Yik Long (born in Hong Kong in 1988) is a Helsinki-based artist working predominantly with ink, on paper and canvas or as the medium for site-specific wall paintings like the ones he executed for Kohta as part of the group exhibition ‘First International Festival of Manuports’ in the autumn of 2021. Chan is represented by Gallery EXIT in Hong Kong, which will host his second solo exhibition this coming autumn. In April 2023, he also opens a solo exhibition at Cazul 01 in Bucharest, Romania.