Air-Powered Art From a Newly Minted Winner of a ‘Genius Grant’

The title of a forthcoming exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, “Paul Chan: Breathers,” has at least several meanings, reflecting the artist’s talent for wry understatement.

For starters, it refers to one of the series by Mr. Chan featured in the show, which has about 40 works and will be on view Nov. 17 to July 16, 2023.

The nylon figures in works like “Katabasis” and “Trithagorean Hoga” (both from 2019) are inflated by fans — breathing, in a way — a concept that will be familiar to anyone who has seen flailing forms in front of various roadside businesses.

“I’m glad the Walker wants their space to feel like a used car dealership,” the Brooklyn-based Mr. Chan joked recently.

A light touch is one of his signatures. “There’s a lot of humor in his work,” said Eleanor Cayre, an art collector and adviser in New York City with the Cayre Art Group.

A closer look at the fan-powered pieces, however, reveals that they have a fine art inspiration — Henri Matisse’s “The Dance” and other works by the French master — with the linked figures seeming to grasp each other as they move.

Mr. Chan’s way of mixing high and low culture was rewarded last week when it was announced that he is a newly minted MacArthur Fellow, the award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that comes with $800,000 over five years, and the popular label of a “genius grant.” (In a text message response to being congratulated, Mr. Chan said that in his experience, being called a genius meant that someone is “making fun of you.”)

Art lovers who want to learn about his work before November can see some of it at the fair Paris+ by Art Basel this week, in the booth of the gallery Greene Naftali, where three works on paper and two sculptures by Mr. Chan will be on view.

For Mr. Chan, 49, “Breathers” also refers to the idea of a respite.

He had established a name for himself for his pointed video installations and animated pieces, including 2004’s “My birds … trash … the future.” But in 2009 he decided to check out of the art world, a break that lasted several years.

“It felt like a job, and I just didn’t want a job,” said Mr. Chan, who went into publishing, starting the company Badlands Unlimited.

In the current era, his breather may resonate with viewers.

“We started thinking about the show in 2020, before pandemic burnout and the great resignation were terms yet,” said Pavel Pys, the Walker curator who organized the show. “But it became impossible not to think about it through that lens.”

Superficially, at least, Mr. Chan’s current work does not seem to relate to his earlier art.

As Mr. Pys put it, “If you gathered what he has made since 1998, it would look like a group show.”

He added, “What I admire about Paul is that he’s a shape-shifter.”

Collectors have been drawn to his thoughtful approach, and the fact that Mr. Chan does not specify every meaning.

“You have to sit with his work,” said Ms. Cayre, who has bought 10 pieces by the artist, and has donated one to the Walker. “It’s not the easiest work if you don’t have the time to appreciate it.”

But Mr. Chan sees continuity in his career.

“It’s really my way of animating without having to look at a screen,” he said of the movement in the “Breathers” series.

Years spent at his computer making videos took a toll. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” Mr. Chan said.

Another series in the Walker show features sculptures made of electrical cords and outlets that have been strung together, which the artist said was another attempt to break down his earlier projections to their component parts, referring in this case to the power source.

That his show is at the Walker also represents a circling back for Mr. Chan, who grew up in the Midwest, in Omaha.

“It’s not a homecoming, but it’s close,” he said, recalling childhood visits to Minneapolis, about a six-hour drive northeast of Omaha, during which he visited the museum.

Mr. Chan was born in Hong Kong, and his family’s reason for moving to the United States highlights yet another meaning of the show’s title.

“I was very sick as a kid,” Mr. Chan said. “I had severe asthma.”

At one point, doctors told Mr. Chan’s mother to start planning his funeral, a fact that she later shared with him.

“As an asthmatic, you’re very aware of what it means to breathe,” he said. “And not to breathe.”

To escape Hong Kong’s air pollution, the family moved to Iowa, then Nebraska. After high school, Mr. Chan earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

After college, he mixed teaching with activism for a while, and started making films and videos. He moved to New York in 1999, getting a job at Fordham University handling audio and video equipment and teaching there. He also received an M.F.A. from Bard College.

Some of Mr. Chan’s work from the early 2000s dealt critically with the American invasion of Iraq; he traveled to Iraq at the end of 2002 and stayed for a month.

“When I came back I spoke at every school I could about why we shouldn’t be in this war,” he said.

In 2003 the dealer Carol Greene of Greene Naftali saw one of his videos — “Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization” — and put it in a group show.

Inspired by the work of the outsider artist Henry Darger, it got a rave review in The New York Times, with the critic Roberta Smith calling it “brilliantly imagined.”

In the years since, Mr. Chan has had a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in 2014, which came along with his winning the Hugo Boss Prize that year.

But as his break from creating art suggests, Mr. Chan has never had anything close to a career plan; leaning into unpredictability is also a feature of the “Breathers.”

“Their movement is precisely choreographed in one way,” Mr. Pys said. “But there’s also this element that is out of control.”

Several paintings in the show, including “Towel (Trithagorean moment)” (2019), are inspired by Matisse’s late-career “Cut-Outs.”

Mr. Chan said that the “Cut-Outs” — a form that Matisse developed with scissors and paper when he was bedridden late in life — were appealing because of how much of a rupture they were from his earlier work, as well as the way the shapes do not fit perfectly together.

“We want all our parts to come to a whole, but life is rarely that,” Mr. Chan said.

“I’m interested in our capacity to make friends with the irreconcilable and the contradictory.”