Paul Chan: Breathers Catalogue

Paul Chan: Breathers
2022

Edited with text by Pavel S. Pyś. Foreword by Mary Ceruti. Text by Vic Brooks, Paul Chan.

Design Director: Emmet Byrne
Designer: Brian Huddleston
Editor: Annie Jacobson
Publications Manager: Jake Yuzna

Printed by die Keure, Belgium
Typefaces: Breathers, Churchward, Design Medium

Papers: Arctic Munken Lynx, Fedrigoni Constellation Snow E/E49



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.

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