Paul Chan

From my review of “Paul Chan: Three Easy Pieces” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center:

Among the most poetic and moving artwork to come out of 9/11 is Paul Chan's series of videos “The 7 Lights .” Most other major works addressing the attacks are documentary — Joel Meyerowitz's photos of the wreckage at Ground Zero, Paul Greengrass's 2006 film re-enactment “United 93.” But Chan's videos, which he began making in 2005, distill the feeling and the meaning of that day into charged symbolic elegies. And they've propelled him to art stardom — a solo survey at New York's New Museum, major profiles in The New Yorker and The New York Times.

"Three Easy Pieces" at Harvard's Carpenter Center offers one of his 9/11 pieces plus two other videos about war. “5th Light,” a triangle of light projected onto the floor, seems like sun from a window. Shadows of leafy branches, wiggling wires, chunks of who knows what drift across the floor toward the gallery wall. Then a shock as a body plummets from the sky. Then more people fall.

Read the rest here.

“Paul Chan: Three Easy Pieces,” Carpenter Center, Harvard, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Nov. 6, 2008, to Jan. 4, 2009.

Pictured from top to bottom: Paul Chan. “5th Light,” 2007, photo by Jean Vong, image courtesy Greene Naftali, New York; “Baghdad in No Particular Order,” 2003. image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.