Paul Chan
1973–
Paul Chan engages philosophy, religion, politics, art, and cultural history in a multivalent practice that has included single-channel videos, charcoal drawings, computer animations, conceptual fonts, and publications of artists’ writings. And although he has filmed in Iraq on the eve of war, created an agitprop map for protestors of the 2004 Republican convention in New York, and staged a collaborative post–Hurricane Katrina production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, Chan distinguishes between the political and the aesthetic in his work. Politics, as he has maintained, requires “collective social power,” whereas his art is engaged with “nothing if not the dispersion of power.”
The series The 7 Lights (2005–7), comprised of seven digitally animated video projections, is among Chan’s most acclaimed works. The cycle’s initial work, 1st Light, spills light across the gallery floor like sunlight through an unseen window. As the color of the illumination shifts in a cycle from dawn to dusk, the shadow of a cruciform utility pole tangled with wires appears. The silhouettes of unmoored objects—cell phone, moped, bicycle wheel, sunglasses—and debris begin to ascend slowly and silently through the frame, finally breaking apart in the air. Flocks of birds cross the scene before, suddenly and quickly, bodies begin falling downward, one at a time and then in clusters, recalling the tragic imagery of men and women jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. This narrative makes specific allusions to the story of the Christian Rapture but more broadly envelops us in a meditative environment of reverie shadowed by calamity.
Introduction
Paul Chan (born April 12, 1973) 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.
He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Wikidata identifier
Q18631656
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 8, 2025.
Introduction
Notable for using digital projections in his installations, and has collaborated with Voices in the Wilderness.
Roles
Artist, graphic artist, installation artist, media artist, painter, video artist
ULAN identifier
500125156
Names
Paul Chan
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 8, 2025.
