Now Showing at The Carpenter Center November 6, 2008–January 4, 2009; Lecture by Chan on November 13, 2008, 6p with a reception to follow.
I walk into the exhibit space on Friday at noon. They are still constructing the space, placing finishing touches to the exhibits, stenciling the last few words onto the walls. I approach one man working on a ladder, and ask him whether there is a particular order in which I should go through the three pieces. He shakes his head at me: “None at all. One’s an installation, one’s a documentary, and one’s animation.” I take his order and walk towards the small triangle of light in the furthest corner. 5th Light, is a triangle of light projected onto the floor, with silhouettes of shapes floating up, or floating down, depending on perspective. Small shadows of guns, toy people, plant matter, wire, float through the triangle of light, objects breaking and expanding in opaque movement.
Every once in a while, while objects are floating, the outlined shape of a man will come sliding down quickly, in the opposite direction. Men are falling quickly through this world; the directionlessness, slow-moving, melancholic, and absurd violence of the triangle and its objects is made starkly clear.
The triangle of light shines on the ground, mixing with the stains and imperfections of the Carpenter Center’s floor upon which I walk. I walk in front of the projector’s light and watch my own shadow eclipsing the objects’ shadows.
At a certain point, the shapes stop dropping and floating, and the triangle becomes a triangle of pure color without shapes. The colors change – from yellow to green to orange to red to pink to purple to blue. The colors create a mood, but they also bring to light the borderlessness of the installation. Now I am alone in the Carpenter Center. There are no borders, no restrictions, no guards to watch me. I walk around the light, onto it, away from it. I penetrate the exhibit’s borders – its tip jutting out into my space, my shadow entering its own. My shadow turns into just another opaque object in the fifth light.
I think of it as a kind of scene-space. As i walk away i face and am blinded by the projector’s light.
I approach the next piece, Baghdad in No Particular Order. This space is a white cube, a small white box in which I sit and watch the footage Chan shot in the city of Baghdad. The film is on repeat, and the first images I see are fires burning in the streets.
The entire film is shot with very shaky camera work. I experience something akin to seasickness, and find the images hard to discern and follow. In one scene, there is a celebration happening in the town. All I can hear is music and foreign language; all I can see are blurry lights moving, the occasional amorphous burst of a firecracker.
There is a constant voice-over spoken by the same woman, but alternating in different languages, providing a sense of continuity as well as confusion. Throughout the film, Chan plays with the possibilities of language and ideas of universality. In one notable scene, he takes us driving along an empty road, a road that could be anywhere, even a dirt road in America’s Midwest. The Arabic cover of the Dolly Parton/Whitney Houston song I Will Always Love You comes on the car’s stereo. The melody of the song sounds familiar to me, just as the road had seemed, and yet it is completely estranged from my understanding. How can we ever really translate, view, or come into contact with another culture?
I leave the little white box of Baghdad and continue onto the last piece, Chan’s animation Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier.
I see animated images of naked people with guns, shooting other animated people. The scene shifts to something similar to Moscow’s Sculpture Park. It looks as though monuments have been dissected, the trash of utopian vision. In this world, too, gravitational forces are an anomaly. The statues float and disseminate – I am reminded of the shapes that floated through the 5th Light. Snow is falling up. Fallen leaves are rising. Direction is lost in this pixelated world of palm trees, flowers, and mutant people that have digressed to become either animals or terrorists. It is a festering paradise.
As I stand in front of the animation screen, sounds permeate throughout the entirety of the exhibit space. A testament to Le Corbusier’s architectural design, all the sounds and memories of Chan’s previous pieces waft into my awareness. In the animation space, birds chirp and people mutter while shooting and terrorizing, and I also hear Arabic music coming from the white viewing room behind me. The sounds, and therefore the memories of the other worlds begin to collapse into one another, informing my experience in a unified way.
And so, everything becomes tied together physically and mentally. The pieces explore what happens when sounds, images, and memories begin to pierce each others’ spaces. Chan explores the limits of our understanding, trying to push us into collision with his art and with the cultural material with which it is made. The opaque shapes I cannot always decipher expand and break. And as I walk out of the exhibit space, I get the feeling that I am just another force-less object floating in the opaque shadow of the world.
-Juli Min
