Hong Kong Artist Chan Wai Lap Turns the Public Pool Into a Study of Unwritten Rules
At Art Basel Hong Kong this week, Hong Kong artist Chan Wai Lap (b. 1986) is bringing an unlikely subject into sharp focus: the public swimming pool. In a city defined by its proximity to the sea, Chan has become absorbed not by open water but by the carefully regulated, visually ordered world of municipal pools — their tiled grids, lane markings, and the quiet codes of conduct that govern bodies in motion.
That preoccupation surfaces across several projects unfolding alongside the fair. In the UBS Art Studio at Art Basel Hong Kong, Chan is presenting “Mimimomo Pool” (2026), a commission for the UBS Art Collection that takes the form of a playful, jacuzzi-like seating installation. Across the harbor in North Point, his exhibition “Jeremy’s Bathhouse” at Oi! — an arts and heritage complex — imagines a bathhouse environment populated by ceramic objects and subtle biological references.
Chan’s interest in these spaces is rooted in a personal turning point: he learned to swim as an adult. What began as a practical attempt to leave the studio became, over time, a way of looking — and a way of noticing how environments choreograph behavior.
“I watched some YouTube videos on swimming, and eavesdropped on swim coaches,” Chan said. Early mornings at the pool, he recalled, were disarmingly calm: “In the morning there were maybe ten people in the pool, and nobody really cared whether I knew how to swim or not. It was a very low-pressure situation.” After a summer of learning the basics, he found himself paying attention not only to technique, but to the architecture and social structure of the pool itself.
For Chan, the pool is both a mental reset and a compressed social world. Without a phone in hand, he described how attention sharpens and associations proliferate — “from the banal to the bizarre.” Over the course of a day, different publics cycle through: after-work swimmers in office districts, families and children in residential neighborhoods. Yet unlike the sea, the pool is a controlled environment, where boundaries are explicit and routines are reinforced by design.
That sense of regulation connects to an earlier strand of Chan’s practice: his work on schools and uniforms. One of his pieces, “Chromatic Uniforms,” is being presented at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT) booth at Art Basel Hong Kong, revisiting his long-standing interest in institutional systems. “Schools operate through standardisation and bureaucratic structures, as do swimming pools, in their own way,” he said.
In both settings, Chan argues, rules are not only written but embedded in objects and surfaces. Tiles, lane ropes, desks, chairs — these elements don’t merely furnish a space; they shape what bodies can do within it. In his drawings, pools are often depicted empty, a choice that shifts the viewer into the role of participant. “In my drawings, the pools are usually empty,” he said. “But in a way the viewer is the swimmer.”
Underlying the work is a broader question about social permission and the body. “Ultimately, I’m interested in the rules around the body,” Chan said, pointing to the strange transformation that occurs when water is introduced: what would be unacceptable on the street becomes ordinary poolside. Bathhouses and swimming pools, he noted, come with their own codes — a choreography of exposure, modesty, and collective etiquette.
For “Chromatic Uniforms,” Chan collected uniforms from different Hong Kong schools and organized them by color, moving from red through orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. The garments vary in cut and style, but the arrangement makes their differences read as part of a system — a catalog of standardization that echoes the pool’s own visual logic.
With “Mimimomo Pool” and “Jeremy’s Bathhouse,” Chan extends that inquiry into spaces where rest, hygiene, and leisure are structured by design and custom. Even when the work is playful — a jacuzzi-like form offered as seating amid the fatigue of an art fair — it remains tethered to his central subject: the subtle, often unspoken rules that organize everyday life.
Chan works across drawing, painting, installation, and artist books. He graduated from Birmingham City University in 2011, and his recent projects suggest a practice increasingly attuned to the social architecture of ordinary places — and to the way a tiled floor or a painted line can quietly tell us how to behave.
