Paul Chan: Breathers

Paul Chan (born 1973) is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, and a recipient of a 2022 MacArthur Genius Fellowship. The exhibition Paul Chan: Breathers is showing at the Walker Art Center November 17, 2022-July 16, 2023.

This volume surveys Paul Chan’s publications and works made between 2010 and 2022 following his return to artmaking. The exhibition takes as its organizing principle the notion of the “breather,” a word that can signify a moment of rest or pause but can also reference a purposeful redirection toward other activities.

Chan’s turn to publishing through the founding of his independent press Badlands Unlimited represented a type of “breather.” Badlands for Chan embodied a radical break that seeded new ideas and ways of working. The term is also what Chan titles a recent major body of work. Breathers is an ongoing series of pneumatic sculptures and installations that he considers a new genre of moving-image works. Tacitly and overtly, the metaphor of the “breather” underscores each of the works in the Walker Art Center exhibition, which, with the artist’s input, is conceived in four sections.

Hardcover, 9.5 x 11 in. / 212 pgs / 243 color / 14 bw.