A Place Beyond Time - Chan13
- Jessica Mouawad
- Sep 17
- 3 min read
What does it mean to live inside of time, yet reach beyond it? For Chan13, this question is the core of his practice. His path from graffiti to painting to watchmaking is less about mediums than about consciousness, a search for how art can bend, stretch, and make time visible.
For Chan13, time is not neutral. It breathes, it changes, it leaves marks. “Antique architecture is like a living being,” he says. “It is always changing, always evolving.” Buildings weather like bodies, murals freeze fleeting moments, graffiti tattoos a city into collective memory.
He doesn’t paint to stop time. He paints to reveal it, to show currents we usually can’t see. “We don’t live in five-dimensional space,” he explains. “So time is our imagination of change.”
Chan13 approaches art like research, with a doctoral degree in design from Harvard University, each subject becomes “almost like a dissertation,” he says, with a series of works testing an idea from multiple angles. Every brushstroke is a hypothesis, every canvas a study in how change leaves its trace.
This curiosity has led him beyond the studio. “I try to combine all kinds of knowledge,” he explains. That has meant anthropology, philosophy, and even neuroscience. Using neurolink devices and brain-computer interfaces, he experiments with recording fragments of dreams. Normally gone on waking, they reappear in gesture, texture, and form. “I try to use different trigger movements,” he says, referencing the dream totems from the movie Inception. “They let me describe the logic of a dream.”
In his hands, science becomes art, and art becomes science.
Through this pursuit, Chan13 embodies the notion of what it means to be a New Renaissance figure; one that questions everything and embraces paradox. In his studies, he saw how Eastern and Western cultures imagine time differently. “Western thinking defines something stable,” he says. “Eastern thinking accepts that definitions will change.”
Instead of choosing one, he holds both. Permanence and impermanence. Stability and flux. Known and unknown. “Humanity these days should look forward into the future of uncertainty,” he reflects. His art leans into the unknown instead of resisting it.
Chan13 insists curiosity is not optional. It is the foundation of the New Renaissance.
Unlike the Renaissance of the past, defined in hindsight, the New Renaissance is defined in motion, by the pursuit of what we do not yet know. That requires a level of diversity: diversity of mediums, narratives, and forms of exhibition. “The way we describe our narratives can be more diverse,” he says. “The way of exhibitions can be more diverse.”
And it requires courage. “Many things can lead the time,” he says, “but art can lead the thinking.”
Chan13's perception of time is intricate and expansive, a constant push and pull between inevitable change and mechanical frameworks. This lens of thought is reflected through his watchmaking practice; as he creates, he compresses time into a physical mechanism. Watches are our most precise attempt to trap time into mechanics, and yet where a watch counts seconds, art provokes futures.
“I can’t say I have this gift of expression,” he admits. “But I think I have this call of duty, an echo I have heard my whole life, that I should be doing art.”
For him, art is not self-expression alone. It is responsibility: to lean forward in time, to carry imagination like a torch, to pass it on.
The Renaissance of the past gave us perspective, anatomy, and the merging of art with science. The New Renaissance, as Chan13 lives it, is about shaping the unknowable. It cannot be defined in advance, it can only be recognized through pursuit.
“The New Renaissance,” he says, “is the concept of shaping the new present that is creating the new future.”
By treating time as living matter, curiosity as foundation, and imagination as collective responsibility, Chan13 shows us what this future might look like: not simply representing the world, but bending it, stretching it, and opening it forward.
