'Clothing for the Spirit': Paul Chan takes a breather at the Walker Art Center
Donna Dralle stares down the long white hall of the Walker Art Center’s Target Gallery to a billowing hooded figure in the distance. Her gaze passes over colorful nylon figures that are dancing with the force of industrial fans, as well as a recreated New York City dollar shop.
At the far end of the gallery is a black figure reminiscent of the villain in “Scream,” the horror film, perched high on a white wall. This is “Pillowsophia (after Ghostface).”
“He moves me very deeply,” says Dralle, a gallery assistant, above the drone of fans. “His arms are outstretched. It’s like he’s praying for help.”
As a sort of art guard, Dralle has spent more time with this artwork than most. These moving figures, she says, make it feel like there is always company in the gallery.
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The series of figures are called “Breathers” and they are at the heart of the Chan exhibition at the Walker, which runs through July 16, 2023. “Paul Chan: Breathers” is the artist’s first solo U.S. exhibition in 15 years.
Walker curator Pavel Pyś, who worked closely with the Hong Kong-born, Midwest-raised and Brooklyn-based artist, says the show’s title comes from Chan’s decision to take a break from the art world in 2009. Leading up to the break, Chan was working predominantly in video animation.
“He said at that time that he hit ‘peak screen,’ which is a sentiment that so many of us think about today, as we've been spending the last two years or so seated in front of screens,” Pyś says. “So, he made this decision to take a breather, he decided to have a radical departure from usual ways of doing things.”
The exhibition outlines a return to artmaking by Chan, who was named a 2022 MacArthur “genius” fellow. The “Breathers” series are some of Chan’s newest work, with the most recent creation — “Anabasis” — completed in 2022.
Pyś likens these nylon figures that loop through their own choreography to the tube people often seen dancing at car dealerships.
There is something inherently playful and goofy about them. Yet, as many of these figures are sewn together, they also expand with meaning, demonstrating a rippling effect that our actions can have on others: We can lift others up or pull them down.
Chan has labeled some of them as “deaders” or “drowners,” and Pyś says that they grapple with issues of decay, mortality and the passing of time. This becomes clear staring up into the vacant hood of “Pillowsophia (after Ghostface),” which feels akin to holding space with the grim reaper.
In November, Chan did a training walkthrough with Walker staff where he explained that these air sculptures go through dozens of prototypes. “Pillowsophia (after Ghostface)” took 32 iterations.
“We basically make clothing for air, which is ridiculous. Like, how do you style and shape clothing for a spirit?” Chan said during the training. “They’re not people, but they’re fickle like people, so you have to deal with them that way.”
Also on view for the first time is the installation “Y.oung P.ublisher 99¢ & Up (2).” The makeshift bodega features fictional products like “Poop Eyes” laundry detergent and “Flurple Unicorn Juice” (items inspired by Chan’s daughter, he says) juxtaposed against neon protest signs with slogans like “Anti Asian=Anti Murican” and “Darker, Gayer, Different.”
For the “New Proverbs” series, Chan lifted the sign’s aesthetic directly from the signs used by Westboro Baptist Church, a small Kansas church that has been labeled a hate group by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Pyś says visitors may also recognize Chan’s placards as they have become widely used by protestors at demonstrations in the past few years.
One wall of this bodega features a display of books. It represents the publishing outfit Badlands Unlimited that Chan co-founded in New York’s Lower East Side during his “breather.”
The Badlands office was a floor up from Y.P. 99¢ & Up, a dollar store run by a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Yu, who are Chinese immigrants. Chan asked if he could sell Badlands publications in the store. At that time, a statement from the publisher said, “We believe books by artists and young writers should be as necessary and ubiquitous as toilet paper.”
“So, you have this bodega, where you could buy toiletries, a comb, a charger — whatever you needed. But you could also buy translations of continental philosophy, you could buy interviews with Marcel Duchamp, you could buy a collection of erotica published by Badlands Unlimited,” Pyś says. “It's as if piece of that presentation from the Yu’s store and Lower East Side was ripped out of the wall and presented to you in the gallery. It's the first time that it's shown in a museum context.”
All of this and more is examined in the exhibition’s hard-cover catalogue, which was also a close collaboration between the Walker and Chan. Walker graphic designer Brian Huddleston even worked with Chan to design a custom typeface for the book and exhibition inspired by the “Breathers” figures.
The exhibition also features much more multimedia work, including a large-format portrait of Saddam Hussein, as well as a room full of a tangle of extension cords and projectors that have been rendered mostly futile by useless connections and circuits. Chan calls these electrical objects and circuits “works on strike,” or items that refuse to perform their purpose.
“I really see him as a shapeshifter,” Pyś says.
In 2024, the exhibition will travel to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis.
