Paul Chan: 1st Light

In Media Res

When two of Paul Chan's animations, loose adaptations of Darger and Beckett, began to appear in gallery and museum shows a couple of years ago, audiences might have forgiven him for repeating his almost instant success. To his credit, and our surprise, he did no such thing. Instead he produced 1st Light, 2005, the opening work in an ambitious seven-part cycle, which the artist has called a "hallucination" of religion and politics for a moment, this one, contaminated by both. Gone is the hot cartoon look of his earlier work. Gone are the custom built suspended screens he projected upon. In their place, Chan has chosen to project directly onto the floor, to eschew soundtrack, and to render his digital figures in a palette dominated by shadowy white and black. 1st Light resembles nothing he has made before.

There are many ways to understand this fourteen-minute work. Perhaps the most provocative is through the lens of religion. At its core, it depicts a version of the Christian Rapture that turns the Biblical story of salvation and the End of Days on its head. Throughout the New Testament, the Rapture is described as the moment when Christ will come again and His faithful will be seized up into the sky to meet their heavenly reward. In Chan's hands, nearly the opposite happens. Against the backdrop of a looming, cruciform telephone pole, one sees things rising — a hypnotic ascendance of iPods, laptops, cars, and sunglasses — while human silhouettes seem to tumble from above, head over heel, to a less glorious fate. Even with its abstract shadow play, the scene cannot but recall the morning of September 11, when workers leaped or fell from the burning heights of the World Trade Center. One feels a horrifying shock of recognition. For some viewers this is all the piece will be about. Others, however, will see that Chan has set the nightmarish image within a meditation that unfurls slowly through a mix of symbolism and aesthetic nuance to reveal a world where trauma, religion, and politics are the cause and effect of each other.

1st Light has an elegant, melancholic power. Without a screen, it turns the floor of the gallery into a surface of illumination, as if the light at ones feet were a real light, cast and distorted through a real window. Chan's forms can resemble Ray-o-grams, the cityscapes of early cinema, or figures in a haunted house. The fluttering birds alighting on wires lend a fine sense of suspense, only to give way to purifying, obliterating passages of white and dark. One thinks of Kara Walker and then James Turrell, artists whose use of light transcends the perceptual for moral or quasi-spiritual ends. And still, for all its aesthetic sophistication, the message of Chan's allegory lies before us. It is not that the Christian Rapture is false. It is that religion, today especially, has become an instrument of power, which may be wielded falsely. In our age of Bush and terrorism, of Red State evangelicals and renewed culture war, the discourse and practice of politics have been swept-up by morality. 9/11 was the gamble of absolutists, but absolutism has also been its balm. To find some truth amidst the sanctimony, Paul Chan has taken a cue from Adorno, who wrote, chillingly, "the way out is through."

PAUL CHAN was born in Hong Kong in 1973 and lives and works in New York City. His solo exhibitions include "Momentum 5: Paul Chan," Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005) and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005). He has shown in the group exhibitions "I Believe in Miracles," Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2005), "Greater New York," PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City (2005), and "The Carnegie International," Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2004).

BENNETT SIMPSON is Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. He has curated recent exhibitions with Kanishka Raja, Roe Ethridge and Paul Chan, who debuted 1st Light at the ICA this fall. From 2002–04, he was Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, where he organized projects by Justine Kurland and Aleksandra Mir, as well as the exhibitions "Shoot the Singer: Music on Video," "The Big Nothing," and "Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne" (forthcoming). He is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Texte zur Kunst.