Samuel Chan

This work is part of Curatorial+Co.'s 2026 group exhibition, 'The Beast In Me'.

Of all the internal mechanisms that drive us, perhaps the most primordial is the beast. We expel the animal, the bodily, the base in favour of the intellect, yet it is the beast that holds what is most irreducibly human—impulses and desires that precede thought: love, rage, care, protection, connection. The very thing we suppress is also the thing that touches what is most vital.

Samuel Chan is an artist and designer living and working between Gadigal and Bundjalung Country. Working across sculpture and installation, his practice draws upon the language of mythology, alternate realities and allegory to explore both shared and private histories. His work often begins as observational representations that expand into emotionally charged, empowered gestures and corporeal metaphors that excavate his lived experience.

'Embrace' explores the beast not as something external to be defeated, but as something internal that is inherited, learned, and ultimately surrendered to. Comprised of one clear and one opaque resin form, the work uses materiality to speak to shifting temporal states of past, present and future. Two intertwined duck necks appear suspended between tenderness and violence, their entanglement suggesting a sense of fate, as though fragmented aspects of the self are drawn toward one another through states of becoming and unbecoming. The work gestures toward surrender as an act where fear, desire and selfhood are not resisted, but transfigured through intimacy.