‘Why do swimming pools give us such special feelings?’ asks the Hong Kong-based artist Chan Wai Lap, who has made these fluid realms the focus of his drawings and installations for the past six years. ‘There is a very strong bodily sensation unique to swimming,’ he reflects during a phone interview. ‘The way your skin registers temperature change, you smell chlorinated water, and your bare feet touch the tiles.’

Chan’s investigation of public pools came from an urge to escape a creative rut, confined in his studio in a cramped city without many public spaces. He taught himself to swim from YouTube videos, but as his sensual descriptions suggest, his heart was not in athletics. Rather, he was fascinated by the aesthetic and sensorial experience of being somewhere at once public and private. ‘Going to swim feels like a ritualistic act,’ he reflects. ‘You arrive in a big changing room, strip naked, and change. You shed your outside self and become part of something else.’

Art lovers in Hong Kong have multiple chances to experience that ‘something else’ this month, with four presentations of Chan’s work exploring pools as uniquely coded alternative spaces. At Art Basel Hong Kong this includes an immersive installation for the UBS Art Studio, a poolside clothing line specially commissioned for the shop, and a series of early drawings at CHAT’s (Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile) booth. Meanwhile, a further new installation, ‘Jeremy’s Bathhouse’, is at the city’s Oi! gallery.

The artist’s UBS commission Mimimomo Pool (2026) is a large circular waterless pool marked by a bright neon sign, bejeweled with blue, purple, and silver mosaic tiles, and with massage devices on its walls. The title is onomatopoeic Cantonese slang, which means to dillydally and the work offers busy fairgoers a chance to slow down, restore their bodies, and perhaps strike up a conversation with others sharing the pool. While participants presumably won’t be shedding their clothes, the bustling art fair setting sounds like fertile territory for exploring Chan’s interest in ‘the abrupt contrast of publicness and privacy.’

Similarly, his solo exhibition at Oi!, ‘Jeremy’s Bathhouse’, humorously stages an inviting space – a heart-shaped bathhouse installation fitted with pink-purple glass and curving tiles made in Jingdezhen, the ceramics capital of China – to find connection for its titular character, a snail. Jeremy needs help, you see. His shell has a rare 1 in 40,000 leftwards spiral, causing reversed reproductive organs and difficulty in finding a mate. Jeremy’s plight taps into the rich history of swim spots as sites of erotic potential, especially for those outside the heteronormative. ‘Why do we make a space where we get to be naked in front of each other?’ Chan asks. ‘How does it shape the perception of our own body and sexuality? How does it make us relate to each other?’

A convivial spirit animates Chan’s commission for the Art Basel shop too: sun hats, T-shirts, hoodies, and bags, which continue ideas from his exhibition ‘LOVEGUARD’ at Gallery Exit in Hong Kong (2025). ‘I have always paid attention to lifeguards,’ he says. ‘It’s rare to have someone who’s paid for the singular purpose of taking care of your life.’ He wonders, ‘Can this role extend to our daily life and other relationships? Can we have “loveguards” who care for matters of the heart? Families, partners – many people can be “loveguards.”’ By naming this feeling and turning it into a logo for goods that can circulate, Chan hopes to prompt others to consider a community based on care.

Chan’s earliest works exploring his experiences in pools were drawings. He developed a mnemonic system to manually count the number of tiles in a pool while he was swimming, so he could faithfully reconstruct its three-dimensional schema in the two-dimensional plane of a drawing. The resulting works marry refreshing aqua blue with the rigor of grids and geometry – a comment perhaps, on the pool as a space of both new freedoms and rules.

Like the Lei Cheng Uk Swimming Pool that the artist first began frequenting, many public swim spots in Hong Kong were built alongside large housing projects in the 1960s–70s by the British colonial government. The architecture boasts a mix of functional utilitarianism and tropical modernism, while surfaces are painted in the iconic pastel colors that give Hong Kong’s urban neighborhoods their unique look. For Chan, these spaces signify both a vital character and nostalgic memory of a city that is in flux and going through generational changes. This interest in collective identity can be seen in Chan’s series of early drawings of Hong Kong school uniforms alongside the artist’s colorful collection of secondary school uniforms, at CHAT’s presentation at the fair.

Chan has also taken his swimming pool rituals across the world through residencies and trips to New York, Budapest, Turkey, Japan, Thailand, and more, on forays into the unknown, where social codes come to the fore. ‘Understanding local rules and context can come as a culture shock,’ Chan says. ‘At public pools in New York visitors are refused entry if they don’t bring their own padlock to secure their belongings. Pools in Berlin meanwhile were strict about photography, and I almost got kicked out by staff who saw me taking pictures of empty pool interiors for my research. The public pools in Turkey are highly gendered spaces.’

For an early installation exploring the pool as a microcosm of social systems, The Lonesome Changing Room (2021), Chan hired actors to loiter absentmindedly in tank tops and shorts, flex their bodies, or stare at their phones, looking for online connection perhaps, while ignoring real world possibilities close at hand. This work exposes the performativity in changing rooms and public pools, testing our personal boundaries and inhibitions. ‘Sometimes you make eye contact with someone but are too shy to hold their gaze,’ says Chan. ‘There is a distinct tension between the very human, naked, bodily, and subjective sensation, and the very abstract, emptied, rational, calm architectural space.’

Chan’s monumental swimming pool installations began with his residency at Hong Kong’s nonprofit art space Tai Kwun. When it shuttered its doors during COVID-19, Chan worked with the outside wall facing the parade ground still open to the public. The resulting massive mural of a swimming pool seen from above, I Will Always Be On Your Side (2020), involved him painting each tile in lustrous blues, and adhering a reflective metallic substrate to the bottom of his pool, in which passersby saw their own reflections. Without needing to change into swimsuits, they became swimmers at a time when public spaces were restricted and deemed dangerous to health and safety.

The artist’s largest piece to date, Some of Us Are Looking At The Stars (2023), installed on the sidewalk outside Hong Kong Museum of Art in Tsim Sha Tsui, was similarly interactive. Inside a towering bamboo crate cube, the artist created an open-sided swimming pool without water, where viewers could get up close to admire its intricate tile work and starry patterns. Furnished with beach chairs, sun umbrellas, floats, and handrails, it was a place for people to take selfies and hang out. The work’s English title, taken from Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan, aimed to strike a romantic, hopeful note for Hong Kong’s citizens at a time of epochal change.

For Chan, the cool waters of public pools provide both the chance to consider social systems in microcosm and a potential oasis, bringing people together in a space where they can shed their everyday selves along with their clothes. ‘I want people to change their physical and mental space, slow life’s rhythms, and encounter anew a familiar scene with wonder and joy,’ he says. ‘I want people to ask, “Why is there no water in the pool?”’