Paul Chan
Visiting Lecturer
6 December 2006, 7:30pm

Download the video podcast of Chan's talk (1hr, 17min.) either in a browser window here or via iTunes here.

Using a wide range of media—low-tech animation, drawing, installation, collaborative projects and web distribution—and a promiscuous range of sources, Paul Chan addresses pop aesthetics and political realities. He has created large-scale animation projects in which he has colorfully animated references to a provocative mix of notable characters, Henry Darger, Samuel Beckett, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Biggie Smalls among them. He’s made seemingly straightforward documentary video on political activists, and distributed self-designed, politically inflected typefaces online. He currently maintains the website "My Own Private Alexandria" (www.nationalphilistine.com), which is an online MP3 library of audio essays (by the likes of Kaja Sliverman, Martha Rosler, and Walter Benjamin) read by the artist—a project that has been described as “an engrossing self-portrait in the age of Google, a composite image of an emphatic young artist finding his way through a vast cultural inheritance.” Chan has had solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, and was included in Greater New York at PS1 and in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.