User:Hexatekin/sandbox/PaulChan

Paul Chan (born 1973) is an American artist, writer and publisher born in in Hong Kong in 1973. 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. Paul Chan’s work concern topics including but not limited to; geopolitics, globalization, and their responding political climates, war documentation, violence, deviance, and pornography, as well as 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 has also engaged in a variety of publishing project, 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 etc, Parkett, Texte Zur Kunst, Bomb, and other magazines and journals.

Childhood and Education
Paul Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973. Hong Kong’s air quality had a deleterious effect on Chan’s health, and so in 1980, his family relocated to Sioux Falls, Iowa, and later to Omaha, Nebraska.

Chan attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1992-1996, receiving a BFA in Video/Digital Arts. Chan served as editor of the school newspaper F for three years. Chan attend Bard’s MFA program beginning in 2000 and graduating in 2002.

Artwork

 * Alternumerics. 2000. Series of downloadable fonts.
 * Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization. 18-minute loop animation. 2002.
 * 7 Lights. series of large-scale projections and drawings based on the Biblical seven days of Creation, 2005. 2007 debut at the Serpentine Gallery.
 * Waiting for Godot. A production of Samuel Beckett's play, in partnership with Creative Time and the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Premier in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, November, 2007.
 * Sade for Sade’s Sake (2009). 5:45 projected animation, inspired by the piece’s namesake Marquis de Sade. Parallels were drawn between Sade and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
 * Sade for Sade's Sake, collection of fonts, the font plays with the importance of rhythm in both pornography and poetry. The series of writings Chan produced with his fonts includes The Mother of All Episodes (2009) - subtitles for an episode of the “relentlessly rhythmic” and therefore “addictive” television series Law & Order.

Videos

 * My Birds…Trash...The Future (2004), two-channel animation.
 * Arguments (2012 - 2013), collection of installations.
 * Nonprojections (2012 – 2013), group of installations
 * Teh Cat n Teh Owl (2014), computer installation, 3D software.

The Tin Drum Triology
Chan’s The Tin Drum Trilogy is composed of the three videos; The Tin Drum, Baghdad in no Partiucular Order, and Now Promise Now Threat. 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).
 * The Tin Drum - Still images of Chan’s drawings of what he imagined members of the Bush administration would look like were they fighting and being wounded in Afghanistan, overlaid with audio and text.
 * Baghdad in no Particular Order (2003), created with footage Chan took of Baghdad while on a trip to Iraq in 2002 with the peace activist group Voices in the Wilderness.
 * Now Promise Now Threat (2005), clips of interviews of residents of Omaha, Nebraska. The interviews focused on the political climate of Nebraska, a deep red state.

Selected Exhibitions
Group
 * High Performance. Julia Stoschek Collection. ZKM, Dusseldorf. 2014.
 * dOCUMENTA 13. Kassel, Germany. 2012.
 * The Bearden Project. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. 2011.
 * Making Worlds, 53rd Venice Biennale. 2009.
 * Walker Art Center. Minneapolis. 2008.
 * Traces du sacrê. Centre Pompidou, Paris. 2008.
 * Whitney Biennial. Whitney Museum of American Art. 2006.
 * Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
 * Para/site Art Space. Hong Kong.

Solos
 * Paul Chan - Selected Works. Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland. 2014.
 * Sade for Sade's Sake. Greene Naftali Gallery. New York. 2009.
 * My laws are my whores. Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. 2009.
 * Paul Chan: The 7 Lights. New Museum. 2008.
 * Paul Chan: The 7 Lights. Serpentine Gallery. London. 2007.
 * Lights and Drawings. March 9 – June 10, 2007. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Collections

 * Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
 * Museum of Modern Art.
 * Guggenheim Museum.
 * Whitney Museum
 * Studio Museum in Harlem
 * Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands)
 * Moderna Musset (Sweden)
 * Astrup Fearnley Museum (Norway)
 * Schaulager / Laurenz Foundation (Switzerland)
 * Ludwig Museum (Germany)
 * M+ (Hong Kong)

Political Work
Along with his history as an exhibiting artist, Chan has worked with a number of different political and activist movements. In 1997, Paul Chan supported the Teamsters-led UPS strike in Chicago. From 2002-2006, Chan was part of an American aid and activist group that opposed the US-led invasions and is called Voices in the Wilderness, and he worked in Baghdad in 2002.

He was a co-founder of the New York chapter of Indymedia.

In 2004, Paul Chan collaborated with Josh Breitbart, Nadxi Mannello, and Elise Gardella to create A People’s Guide to The Republican National Convention (2004).

In 2011, Chan helped recruit volunteers to get involved with what would become known as The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a free newsletter written and distributed by Occupy volunteers.

Publications

 * Chan, Paul, Daniel Birnbaum, Heidi Naef, Isabel Friedli, Catherine Schelbert, Suzanne Schmidt, and Tarcisius Schelbert. 2014. Paul Chan: selected works. Basel: Laurenz-Foundation, Schaulager
 * Chan, Paul. Phaedrus Pron. Brooklyn, N.Y: Badlands Unlimited, 2010.
 * Chan, Paul. The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade's Sake. 2010. New York: Badlands Unlimited.
 * Chan, Paul. 2010. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: a field guide. Köln: Walther König.
 * Chan, Paul, and Melissa Larner. 2007.Paul Chan: The 7 Lights. Cologne: Verlag Der Buchhandung Walther König.
 * Chan, Paul. 2007. The Shadow and Her Wanda: Story and Pictures and Footnotes (strictly for Children). London: König.
 * Chan, Paul, and Martha Rosler. 2006.Paul Chan, Martha Rosler. New York: A.R.T. Press.