Biography of Paul Chan
Paul Chan finds increasingly inventive ways to combine his political outlook with his art practice. An activist as much as an artist, he effortlessly marries his interests despite his belief that “the desire to bridge what we call art and politics is in fact a fear of both.” Chan has an ability to combine his dualistic tendencies, so that we can come across from his traditional to the cutting edge, from the erotic to the religious.
At a time when the US did not allow US citizens from working in Iraq, in 2002, Chan worked with the aid group Voices in the capital, Baghdad. His prominent series Tin Drum Trilogy 2002-05 addresses significant issues in culture and politics in the U.S. through America’s Middle Eastern interests, George W. Bush, and religion in the Bible Belt. Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973 and was raised in Nebraska. Now a resident of New York, he was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014.
Paul Chan now lives and works in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include the Deste Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra in Greece in 2015 and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2015. He is featured in many of the world’s most prominent collections including Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
