The Brooklyn Rail

Coinciding with a palpable sense of pandemic-ridden, pre-election social and political burnout, Paul Chan’s Breathers at Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) St. Louis dissuades viewers from bearing amnesic witness to regularized flows of live-streamed, catastrophic events. Drawing our attention to the present through the contingencies of pneuma (Greek for “breath and spirit”) and light sculptures, Chan tests the thresholds of sculptural representation. Chan, moving laterally with a sense of cunning, describes his ever-expanding oeuvre in terms of labor relations. Breathers is an accumulation of uncanny, inspired objects transfixed by pneuma, a shared breath or sigh of relief from the brutality of capitalist realism. In a conversation about the exhibition with the curator, Pavel S. Pyś, Chan turns to French utopian socialist Charles Fourier and his notion of social harmony premised on pleasurable labor to assert a shift in his own relation to artistic practice. “He believed everyone should be allowed to do anything they want . . . but only for two hours,” Chan cautioned with a smile, indicating that the exhibition requires a whole-bodied, sensorial receptivity from its viewer to receive its most expansive meanings.

In 2010, Chan took a step away from the art world, to keep pace with activist organizing and online publishing. Originally shown at Schaulager in 2014, and now currently on view at CAM, Chan’s “Arguments” (2012-2013) marked the first chapter in his return after a five-year “breather.” Entanglements of yellow, orange, and black electrical cords form gestural line drawings, looping down and across a large-scale wall in Magnolia (2012). Plugged into a triad of wall outlets, the assumed electrical circuitry is terminated abruptly; a loose wire lies exposed electrifying the floor. Nearby, The argument: haircut (of the year) (2012–13) takes a similar trajectory, away from the linearity of electrocution, plugging into several outlets and a taped cardboard box labeled “SUPER WEIRDER.” Spooky energies and imagined scenarios remain long after the elements perform their materiality. Haunted by man’s constant fascination with electrocution and instantaneous death, Chan delivers contingencies between indexical markers, positing the box as both source and receptacle of potential danger. In Sock N Tease (2013), two projectors meet the event of electrocution in a single, circularly laid cord. In Die All Jennies 2 (2013), a projector sits on cardboard, wetting itself while plugged into two concrete-filled shoes. A sourceless HDMI cable depicts the artist’s ambiguity in developing content. Projector lenses blink and flicker, indicating a significant, spirited happening within the body of the machine. In pure panic, the eye struggles to capture pneuma in the fine particulate of central air-conditioning. Suspending any ideological thinking, Chan elucidates the dangers of socio-cultural fiction in our ever-mediated technological landscape. As we look past the visual and biospheric waste of generative AI and frantically toward its potential, it’s easy to forget the conditions that produce perceived truths also produce very real falsities. Leaving us with a longing for an authentic representation of the present, technological apparati return to their vestal state. “Nonprojections” (2013) and “Arguments” point to the apocalypse of automated habits in a matrix of subconscious tendencies.

Juxtaposing techno (and footwear) fetishism with the contingencies of scientific advancement, Chan’s “Breathers” series summon viewers into a sequence of convulsing nylon sculptures, marking the second chapter of the artist’s return. Pillowsophia (after Ghostface) (2016) billows overhead. An air-filled black hoodie trembles near ceiling height. Beneath, a network of concrete-filled shoes connect the figure to the whir of a concealed 18-inch fan. The ubiquitousness of the lynching of unarmed Black people by law enforcement officers, the literal and metaphoric absence of power, the immediate and everyday hauntings of injustice oblige us to consider traumatic cycles of violence imposed by the State on bodies of color.

Falling out of the syntax of screen time and into the pneumatic phenomenon of breath in real-time, a chain of four “Bathers” (from Chan’s “Bathers” series) dressed in scanty swimwear sway hand in hand in Katabasis (2019). Animated by the breezes of 14-inch electric fans, three of the silhouetted forms (all black nylon) chastise one another with less force. The fourth neon pink body comes alive in spurts as gusts of air travel down interconnected arms, sensuously delirious in her own becoming. Considered by Chan to be moving images, the “Breathers” and “Bathers” collapse and grow erect, taken over by an embodied primal impetus. As respiratory viruses dictate new conventions of isolation in the West, Chan—who is asthmatic—brings multiple socio-temporal relations from his own experiences of life and death into proximity. Nearby, a series of large-scale brightly colored “Towels” (2019) hang off high wall-mounted wooden dowels. Created alongside “Breathers” and “Bathers,” Towel (Trithagorean moment) (2019) and Towel (Katabasis 2) (2019) appear to encapsulate the spirit of Chan’s kinetic subjects, yet fail to deliver any exacting or anticipated image of the inner life of said “Bathers.” As towels drying in broad daylight, a parody on the history and re-evaluation of abstract painting cohabitates in Chan’s symbolic, figurative code.

Audiences are privy to the artist's lifelong commitment to activism through a survey of experimental publishing projects under Badlands Unlimited in the final installment of the exhibition. A profusion of materials, set up as a bodega in Y.oung P.ublisher 99¢ & Up (2) (2017) replete with “essential items every New Yorker needs,” combines covers of Badlands erotic novellas, an oversized 99¢ grocery bag on a flagpole, Chinese ink paintings repurposed as detergent labels, a hooded, Jabba the Hutt-like crocheted Trump toy with an animatronic pirate-cat guarding neon hued protest posters from the publisher’s “New Proverbs” series. By co-opting the font used by the Westboro Baptist Church to promote anti-LGBTQ hate, Chan printed a series of posters for the Women’s March in Washington, DC and New York. From Occupy Wall Street to combating Anti-Asian racist attacks to raising direct fiscal support for Planned Parenthood, Heart of Dinner, and the American Civil Liberties Union, the capaciousness of Chan’s direct involvement in movement-making intersects with the artist’s predilection for typography, placing collective awakening over the status quo of individual success.

The exhibition closes with a series of large-scale ink-on-paper drawings Chan made in 2020 using his non-dominant hand and Untitled (e-reader) (2022), a headless slumped figure reading an iPad with self-flipping ebooks on the ongoing Nakba in Palestine. Chan’s exhaustion with the dominant world orders and commitment to subverting power structures moves away from any positivistic reason or search for enlightenment. Laying the ground for a true, humanist evaluation of present-day politics and sitting in intentional misalignment with the flawed promises of history, Breathers appeals to an exhaustible, apathetic art world to seek its ingenuity as an antidote to the widespread disillusionment with the political system.