On view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis | PAUL CHAN: Breathers
Greene Naftali
Biography
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From video to drawing, writing to publishing, to kinetic objects and beyond, the Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist Paul Chan has found ever-new means by which to realize a sprawling set of artistic, philosophical, and political positions. Well-versed in Classics and critical theory, modernist literature and ’90s hip-hop, Chan has, since the turn of the 21st century, infused his art with a Homeric quality: cunning, which the artist describes as “twofold or dialectical.” The figure of Odysseus “illustrates in emphatic fashion what I think we intuitively understand,” Chan has said: “that reasoning is discursive and compelling when it is also aesthetical.” Drawing on a disparate array of visual and textual references, his early net-based projects and video installations like My birds... trash... the future (2004) illustrated Chan’s own cunning—his commitment to advancing discourse and aesthetics, each through the other. The 7 Lights (2005) would distill animation further—just light and shadow—immersing the viewer in an interpretation of the Old Testament creation story.
After his initial burst of activity and recognition, Chan withdrew from art production from 2009–14. He kept working, however, establishing the imprint Badlands Unlimited, which published over 50 titles by artistic predecessors and peers (Yvonne Rainer, Cory Arcangel, Martine Syms), philosophers (from Socrates to Wittgenstein), and Chan himself. He returned to art in 2014, staging a retrospective at Schaulager, Basel and winning the Guggenheim Foundation’s Hugo Boss Prize. Since then, he has extended his animation practice off-screen, with a series of motile nylon figures, their rippling movements propelled by electric fans and their forms and titles registering Chan-ian concerns both metaphysical and political. These so-called Breathers manifest what the artist theorizes as the “kairological artwork”—objects which “seize time the way a beat holds a song… They last as experiences by not staying whole as forms.”
Paul Chan lives and works in New York. Chan was named a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Recent solo exhibitions include Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2024); Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond (2023); M+, Hong Kong (2023); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2022); Greene Naftali, New York (2020, 2019, 2017); Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2018); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2017); Deste Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra (2015); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); Schaulager, Basel (2014); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2009); New Museum, New York (2008); and Serpentine Gallery, London (2007). The 2014 recipient of the Hugo Boss Prize, Chan co-curated the exhibition Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection (2019), and in 2007 he collaborated with Creative Time and The Classical Theatre of Harlem to stage a site-specific presentation of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.
His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, on permanent loan to the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; M+, Hong Kong; Magasin III, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Lectures & Conversations
PAUL CHAN: Critic-in-Residence Lecture Series – "Pleasure as Progress," Otis College of Art and Design, 2024
PAUL CHAN: "Ars::longa" Artist Lecture | Graduate Program in Media + Modernity, Princeton University, 2024
Artist Talk: PAUL CHAN on his solo exhibition Breathers in conversation with curator Pavel Pyś, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2024
Machina Aesthetica, or Impressions on Art In and Out of the Machine Age with PAUL CHAN for The University of Washington, 2023
PAUL CHAN in conversation with Amia Srinivasan for Artforum, 2023
Charlotte Burns in conversation with PAUL CHAN on The Art World: What If…?! Podcast, 2023
PAUL CHAN hosted on The Art Angle Podcast for Artnet, 2023
PAUL CHAN on RACHEL HARRISON, or what is non-salvific art, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2020
On Art and the Screen Age: Artist Talk with PAUL CHAN, Hirshhorn Museum, 2020
PAUL CHAN Artist Lecture, Hunter College MFA, 2020
Personal Data, Online Privacy, and Fake News – According to the Greeks, Getty Museum, 2019
Una's Lecture with PAUL CHAN: The Bather's Dilemma, University of California Berkley, 2019
PAUL CHAN on The Bathers, Remai Modern, 2018
PAUL CHAN and Carroll Dunham in Conversation, New Museum, 2017
The Fear of Art: The Potency of Art with Holland Cotter, The New School, 2015
The Cat and The Owl: Remembering Chris Marker, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2013
Interview with PAUL CHAN about Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, Creative Time, 2010