New York-based artist, writer, publisher, and 2022 MacArthur Fellow Paul Chan came to prominence in the early 2000s with moving image works that touched on war, religion, pleasure, and politics. Around 2009, following a decade of art-making, Chan turned his attention to experimental publishing and the economics of information.
Paul Chan, 2Chained or Genesia and Nemesia, 2019. Nylon, fan, screenprint, tarp, synthetic woven fabric. Ⓒ Paul Chan. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo credit: Zeshan Ahmed.
Paul Chan: Breathers, originated by Pyś with support from Matthew Villar Miranda for the
Walker Art Center, tracks the artist’s activities since this “break” from art, from 2009 to 2022. The exhibition’s three categories each illustrate Chan’s approach to experimentation, which is guided by philosophical inquiry and an unrestrained response to media and inherited formal conventions.
Breathers begins with Chan’s founding of the press Badlands Unlimited, which expanded the possibilities of publishing through its approach to language, technology, design, and networks of circulation. Next, in 2012, the artist began experimenting with freeing the moving image from the screen, leading to his installation series
Arguments (2012-2013) and
Nonprojections (2013). Finally, the
Breathers sculptures (2016-2022), set in motion by industrial fans, place moving images into real space and in connection with the people in it. The works convey a sense of openness that can be seen in relation to both Chan’s life and career choices since 2009 and shared sentiments of fatigue, constriction, and oppression.
Paul Chan, Untitled (Trasher), 2019. Muslin, nylon, polyfil, wire, wood, Y.P. plastic bag, Opening Ceremony tote bag, jersey knit. Ⓒ Paul Chan. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo credit: Zeshan Ahmed.
Jeffereis will organize the presentation of
Breathers at
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) to take over the Museum inside and out. In addition to the 40 works in the galleries, Chan will contribute a new project related to his voter registration advocacy for the Museum’s outdoor video projection platform, known as Street Views. This project will focus on pre-registering young adults who will be 18 at the time of the general election, expanding on the Museum’s own voter registration initiative, which began in 2020. Each voter who registers at CAM will be offered a free print by Chan.
Paul Chan, ANTI ASIAN = ANTI MURICAN, 2021. Full-color print on corrugated plastic. Ⓒ
Following its presentation at the Walker,
Breathers will travel to the
Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in September 2023 before arriving at CAM in March 2024. The catalog is edited with text by Pyś and includes contributions from Vic Brooks, Mary Ceruti, and Paul Chan.
Misa Jeffereis is Associate Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, where she is organizing a forthcoming exhibition by Justin Favela. She curated Mona Chalabi: Squeeze (2022), Alia Farid: At the Time of the Ebb (2022), and the Great Rivers Biennial (2020), featuring Kahlil Robert Irving, Tim Portlock, and Rachel Youn; co-curated Shara Hughes: On Edge (2021); and has programmed CAM’s Street Views series with exhibitions by Jonathas de Andrade, Oliver Laric, Jennifer West, and Marina Zurkow. Prior to CAM, Jeffereis was Curatorial Associate at the Walker Art Center. In 2021, she participated in the Association of Art Museum Curators Mentorship Program. She is on the board of Gallery 210 at University of Missouri at St. Louis, and the board of Midwest Artist Project Services, an organization that serves and empowers artists in the Midwest. Jeffereis holds a MA in Art History from Hunter College in New York.
Pavel Pyś is the Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, where he has organized solo exhibitions by Daniel Buren, Paul Chan, Faye Driscoll, Michaela Eichwald, Carolyn Lazard, Sarah Michelson, and Elizabeth Price, as well as the group exhibition The Body Electric (2019). He was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (2018) which aided research towards Multiple Realities: Experimental Art from the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-80s (2023). Pavel co-curated Kingdom of the Ill (2022) at Museion Bolzano with Sara Cluggish. Between 2011 and 2015, Pavel was the Exhibitions & Displays Curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo curatorial residency. He has published essays on artists including Trisha Baga, Carol Bove, Michael Dean, John Latham, Wilhelm Sasnal, Alina Szapocznikow, Fredrik Værslev, and Haegue Yang.
Matthew Villar Miranda is the the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center where they researched a co-organized series of forthcoming exhibitions by Asian American and Pacific Islander artists including Pao Houa Her, Paul Chan, and Pacita Abad. Recent projects include Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration (2020) at the Arizona State University Art Museum. They conduct research for the Culture and Structure unit for Museums Moving Forward, a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative of intergenerational, cross-institutional coalition of art museum professionals committed to advancing intersectional equity across the museum sector and serve on the Acquisition Committee for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary of Art. They received their BA in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.