Paul Chan

The humble assembly of video works in “Paul Chan: Three Easy Pieces” illuminates the range of the artist’s burgeoning oeuvre, one that has been accompanied by his unflagging interventions within the realm of political activism. Chan insists that he keeps his art and his politics largely separate—a mantra frequently reiterated by critics. But while the precise tack of his own ideologies remains productively indeterminate in his work, its presence is palpable even in refracted form, in each of the three very different pieces on view.

Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier, 2000–2003, consists of a seventeen-minute animation projected onto an unusually wide suspended screen that can be viewed from both sides. The work’s content and format play on the legacy of Darger, the Chicago-based outsider artist whose ample, unpublished writings and recto-verso drawings meditated on the subjectivity and sexuality of children by turns liberated and oppressed. Salted with elliptical references to artists from Pieter Brueghel to Hans Bellmer, the video’s alchemy of highbrow insinuation, gallows humor, and cartoony high jinks lends it a whiff of South Park–ish sarcasm, even while it evokes decidedly more trenchant matters. At a lecture delivered in conjunction with the exhibition’s opening, Chan remarked that he wanted to update Darger’s sensibility, imagining what he would have done “if he were alive and had an MFA and a computer.”

As one part of a series of seven, 5th Light, 2007, consists of a wedge of light—alternately white and vividly colored—projected onto the concrete floor, through which pass the silhouettes of floating forms. The weightless gymnastics evokes a kind of kinetic Suprematism: a mesmerizing, often abstract reverie punctuated by the contours of uncannily displaced objects and bodies. The aleatory rhythms and irruptions of this piece find unlikely echoes in the documentary textures of Baghdad in No Particular Order, 2003, which Chan filmed in Iraq before the US-led invasion as part of what he calls “witnessing work.” While these disparate works betray no tidy, obvious similarities, they all insist on ellipses, both formal and semantic—a reflection, perhaps, of Chan’s remark that his fundamental concern is with “not being whole.”