Paul Chan “3rd Light” at Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo, Vicenza

“Shelter all the images of language
and make use of them, for they are in the desert,
where you must go in search of them.”
—Jean Genet

The exhibition 3rd Light is dedicated to the work of the same name by artist Paul Chan (Hong Kong, 1973 – who lives and works in New York). Through video, installations, and drawings, Chan has emerged internationally as one of the most original and visionary voices in contemporary art. His works blend together an unprecedented relational aesthetic with philosophical reflections on life, politics, religion, and desire. Although several pieces in his oeuvre initially appear colorful and playful (such as Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization; Breathers), Chan’s imagery belongs to a darker realm – a world whose visions evoke a violent, anguished space marked by desolate, apocalyptic atmospheres. His visual universe unfolds in a state of perpetual catastrophe, dangerously echoing the trajectory of our present.

The work on display, marking the Foundation’s third exhibition dedicated to the Bonollo Collection, was acquired in 2006 and is part of the expansive, chapter-based cycle The 7 Lights (2005–07), one of Chan’s most ambitious and groundbreaking projects. Launched in 2005, the cycle combines obsolete computer technology with hypnotic imagery to stage a series of enigmatic encounters with light and darkness. Presented at biennials and exhibitions at an international scale, pieces from the Lights series have captured the attention of critics and international audiences, even though they have rarely been shown in Italy. The series comprises large-scale projections and digital drawings. Chan’s animations abound with visions that can be interpreted as idyllic or apocalyptic, utopian or tragic. The seven works seem to evoke a hallucinatory rendition of the biblical account of creation in seven days. Simultaneously, Chan’s oeuvre conjures memories of several tragic events from modern history over the past thirty years, such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the war in Iraq, and the relentless outbreaks of violence worldwide.

In the title, the word “light” (which in Italian is “luce”) is crossed out. Drawing attention to its dramatic absence, Chan explains: “What I show are projections of light and shadows, and shadow is erased light”. The six projections are immersed in silence, likely intended to create a space for philosophical, religious, and aesthetic contemplation. Each projection lasts about fourteen minutes before restarting in an endless loop, punctuated by monochromatic waves of warm reds and yellows that gradually yield to black, distinct shapes floating across the surface. In contrast, the seventh work in the series is composed of abstract drawings on paper intended for musical manuscripts. Amidst explosions, wreckage, and drifting debris, Chan tears at the margins of the spectacle of death – so central to the media landscape in recent decades – through a stream of images filtered by his own dreamlike imagination.

Taken together, the Lights compress and animate images of the past and present into crisp, fleeting shadows, creating an expansive cycle of destruction and rebirth projected onto floors, corners, and walls. Rather than merely evoking images from cinema screens or televisions, they recall the interplay of light as it filters through a window. Each Light begins with a calm rhythm, but gradually the atmosphere shifts: human silhouettes, animals, and everyday objects rise into the air, as if possessed by dark forces, only to plunge into the void or be sucked out of view.

In 3rd Light, the work here on display, the distorted and trembling images of the animations seem to emerge from a post-nuclear atmosphere. This is the most intense and extraordinary piece in the entire series, where the artist plays with the seductive tension of imagery and the traumatic sensation of an inescapable apocalypse already in progress. Unique within the cycle for having its images projected onto the floor, the work further amplifies the audience’s disorientation: one is left with the impression of standing on the edge of a precipice, even as the figures follow one another in a hypnotic succession and the atmosphere completely engulfs us. By rejecting the frontality of conventional projection and instead using the floor as the surface along which silhouettes glide, Chan also tempers the violence of images typically emitted by a computer monitor or television, unveiling his meticulous exploration of new methods for displaying moving images. In this depiction of disaster, an unsettling wind continually blows as the artist sifts through his imagery in search of elements to craft new visions. One can witness mundane objects—a pitcher, cups, an oversized fork – and various helpless animals, including a dog stubbornly resisting gravity before finally succumbing to exhaustion, all drifting across the floor.

3rd Light is also the only work in the series in which the artist incorporates a tangible object—a long wooden table—a reference drawn from Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated painting The Last Supper, created between 1494 and 1498. In order to reproduce it faithfully, Chan traveled to Milan, where the painting is housed, and studied it meticulously to create a replica based on its original proportions. Another unique aspect of the work is its segmented image, divided into three parts, as if we were witnessing light and shadow filtering through the grand window of an imposing cathedral. The piece emanates a perverse tension between distant universes; on one hand, it envelops us in a meditative and ecstatic calm as the images flow and the colors shift, while on the other, we are overtaken by a lyrically anxious resignation, a trauma that reminds us of the fragility of the human essence in its most basic needs. It is through such a tension between the traumatic awareness that the world might have reached its end and the almost innate urgency to construct new narratives to reimagine the future, that Chan’s artistic practice acquires an uncontrollable prophetic energy. In turn, it propels the public toward the rebirth of imagination through the unstoppable flow of hallucinations and premonitions to which the artist subjects the viewers with his visionary power.

The cycle The 7 Lights also conveys a narrative rich in historical and artistic references, including ancient Greek mythology and Baroque painting. While at the center of the cycle there is a strong religious symbolism – used by Chan as an imaginative force, a tool to open new ways of inventing and describing our present – it does not lack multiple references to major figures in art history, beginning with Caravaggio and his iconic use of light. Chan borrows several citations from the iconography of the Ascension and the Last Judgment, where vortices of human and celestial bodies rise into the sky or plunge into the inferno. Among the figures that most inspire Chan’s conceptual and visual practice are the poets and writers Robert Walser, Henry Michaux, Colette and Samuel Beckett; as well as Mark Twain, Karl Kraus, Georges Bataille, and Voltaire; the painters William Blake and Francisco Goya, and the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who profoundly influences his aesthetic lexicon. These references reveal Chan’s inexhaustible desire to embrace and describe the violence and complexity of reality, as well as his exceptional ability to depict an alternative world through the power of invention and the freedom of poetry.

Thus, the exhibition 3rd Light represents a unique opportunity to explore the world of an artist whose animations confront some of the themes characterising history and human nature. By combining images of stark simplicity with elaborate reflections on the idea of illumination, the passage of time, and the representation of disaster, the work—which transforms the Foundation’s spaces into an immersive environment in which the public is invited to venture forth, abandoning any awareness of time and space—presents itself as an enigmatic encounter with the lights and shadows of our time. Trapped in an endless repetition that renders them both unsettling and reassuring, the Lights suggest that perhaps there is no true end, but only an eternal beginning, much like the relentless movement of a clock’s hands.

It is through this reflection directed toward the construction of future worlds and the role that art can assume in such a generative practice that the words of the celebrated American author Ursula K. Le Guin, spoken during one of her most incisive addresses at Stanford University in 1981, resound with force: ““An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen to or watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. And yet all it is is an explorer’s sketch-map. A chart of shorelines on a foggy coast. […] “To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have “lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast”¹
—Chiara Nuzzi

at Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo, Vicenza
until May 24, 2025