Paul Chan (born April 12, 1973 in Hong Kong) is an American artist, writer and publisher. His single channel videos, projections, animations and multimedia projects are influenced by outsider artists, playwrights, and philosophers such as Henry Darger, Samuel Beckett, Theodor W. Adorno, and Marquis de Sade. Chan's work concerns topics including geopolitics, globalization, and their responding political climates, war documentation, violence, deviance, and pornography, language, and new media.
Chan has exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, documenta, the Serpentine Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and other institutions. Chan is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. Chan has also engaged in a variety of publishing projects, and, in 2010, founded the art and ebook publishing company Badlands Unlimited, based in New York. Chan's essays and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, October, Tate, Parkett, Texte Zur Kunst, Bomb, and other magazines and journals.
Childhood and education
Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973. Hong Kong's air quality had a deleterious effect on Chan's health, so his family relocated to Sioux City, Iowa in 1980, and later moved to Omaha, Nebraska.
Chan attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1992 to 1996, receiving a BFA in Video/Digital Arts. Chan served as editor of the school newspaper F for three years. Chan attended Bard's MFA program beginning in 2000 and graduating in 2002.
Career
Chan's career as an artist can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until 2009; his “hiatus” period, stretching from 2009 until the 2014, during which he established his publishing company Badlands Unlimited, and his “Return to art” period, from 2016 on, during which his work abandoned using video projections and computer screens.
Early works
In 1999, Chan launched his personal website www.nationalphilistine.com. The website would become the platform from which he distributed videos, animations, fonts and other works for free. One such project was Alternumerics (2000), a series of fonts available for use on Macs and PCs that transform what the user types into both legible and illegible blocks of text that explore both the "relationship between language and interactivity" and the "fissure between what we write and what we mean." Another was Now Let Us Praise American Leftists (2000), a 3-minute 35 second experimental animation that sought to "eulogize and ridicule the American leftist movement of the past century.
Chan completed his 18-minute animation Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization in 2002. In 2003, the animation became the first of Chan's works to be shown in an art gallery (Greene Naftali). When it was shown, the animation was played in a loop and projected on a "floating screen shaped and textured like a torn scroll." The characters and events in the animation are heavily influenced by Henry Darger's novel The Story of the Vivian Girls. Happiness received a warm critical reception.
Following a 2002 trip to Iraq with the anti-war activists Voices in the Wilderness, Chan's work became increasingly concerned with war and politics. Re: The Operation (2002) is Chan's interpretation of what he imagined members of the Bush administration would look like were they fighting and being wounded in Afghanistan. The video consists of still images of Chan's drawings overlaid with audio and text. Baghdad in no Particular Order (2003) was created with footage Chan took of Baghdad while on his trip to Iraq. The video was composed of shots of ordinary life in Baghdad. Chan's third video in the same vein was Now Promise Now Threat (2005), a video consisting of clips of interviews of residents of Omaha, Nebraska. The interviews focused on the political climate of Nebraska, a deeply Republican state. Chan gathered Re: The Operation, Baghdad in no Particular Order, and Now Promise Now Threat into a single collection he named The Tin Drum Trilogy. Despite major differences in the "form, philosophy" and "spirit" of the three videos, Chan put them together as a trilogy connected by what he felt was "the room temperature of the times," as was the form expressed in Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum (1959).