Video History Project

People

Paul Chan

Born 1973, Hong Kong; lives in New York, New York. Paul Chan keeps his art and his politics separate, or at least he claims to. He has been involved in the aid group Voices in the Wilderness (with whom he spent an unsanctioned month in Iraq) and participated in creating The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention (an agitprop map of New York City for use by protesters in 2004).

Yet while such activities may not appear to directly inform his art practice, they tie into his general insistence on "hallucinating" repressed relationships in contemporary society: between the sacred and the secular, the high and the low, the poetic and the pornographic. Paul Chan was a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation New Media Art Fellow and director of an online political/aesthetic thinktank at www.nationalphilistine.com. His work is distributed by Video Data Bank.

Cite this record

"Paul Chan." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/paul-chan.

Download RIS citation
Summary

Paul Chan, born 1973 in Hong Kong and based in New York, is an artist who maintains a separation between his art and political activism; he spent an unsanctioned month in Iraq with the aid group Voices in the Wilderness and helped create The People’s Guide to the Republican National Convention, an agitprop map of New York City for protesters in 2004. His work centers on hallucinating repressed relationships in contemporary society, including contrasts between the sacred and secular, the high and the low, and the poetic and the pornographic. Chan was a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation New Media Art Fellow, directed the online political/aesthetic thinktank at www.nationalphilistine.com, and his work is distributed by Video Data Bank.

Submit a change or correction

If unchecked, this will appear as a public note on the site immediately. Spam filters may delay publication, but all submissions are reviewed by staff.

Changes will be reviewed and integrated as time permits. For major changes, feel free to email [email protected].

Last modified 17 June 2011

Related records

  • Carlos Motta People

    Carlos Motta (b. Bogot·, Colombia, 1978, lives in New York) was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program, (2005-2006), and completed his MFA at Bard College in 2003. Working primarily in photography and video installation, he uses strategies from documentary and sociology to engage wit…

  • Set in Motion: The New York State Council on the Arts Celebrates 30 Years of Independents: Notes on the Rise of Independent Media Bibliography

    Daryl Chin, an artist and critic in New York City, surveys the rise of U.S. independent media and credits government arts funding—notably the New York State Council on the Arts—with widening access to production, equipment and distribution. He outlines technological shifts (Super-8, Betacam, VHS, 16mm, optical printers, Portapak) and institutional supports such as the Millennium Film Workshop and media distributors. He cites works including Kathe Sandler's A Question of Color and discusses media hybridity, diversity, funding constraints and the need for computer literacy.

  • Mariam Ghani People

    Mariam Ghani is a Brooklyn-based artist working in video, installation and new and tactical media; her work maps contrapuntal narratives in border zones between cultures. Her projects include net art commissions for Turbulence.org and artwurl, screenings and installations at international festivals and institutions including Eyebeam Atelier, texts in Sarai Reader 05 and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, a BA from NYU (2000) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2002), residencies at LMCC and Eyebeam Atelier, and a 2007 Finishing Funds award from the Experimental Television Center.

  • Paul Wong People

    Paul Wong is a pioneer video artist and media activist whose work ranges from documentary to new media installations; his works have been both censored and honored and are held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He is a founding director of Video Inn, noted as one of the clearly leading international centers of alternative video; he lives in Canada.

  • Evan Roth People

    Evan Roth is a media maker focused on technology in popular culture and the urban environment; he received an MFA from Parsons and teaches courses there on visual programming and Geek Graffiti. He is a senior fellow at the Eyebeam OpenLab, an open source creative technology research and development lab for the public domain. He lives in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and cat and lists www.ni9e.com and www.graffitiresearchlab.com; he reports spending his free time violating laws related to copyright and vandalism.

  • Paul Ryan People

    https://web.archive.org/web/20190324123105/http://www.earthscore.org/ Paul Ryan worked in 1967-68 directly with Marshall McLuhan as a Fellow at Fordham University where he began experimenting with video. His first art showing was a video piece called Everyman's Moebius Strip in the 1969 Howard Wise …