Picturing the Wreck, writing the disaster: in work that has recently appeared in several international exhibitions, Paul Chan explores themes that cut across politics, culture and religion. His first solo museum show, at the Blanton in Austin, featured a moody new video of dark silhouettes and a high-keyed animation whose references range from Baudelaire to Biggie Smalls

Paul Chan--who is often labeled an activist artist but says he prefers to keep his artwork separate from his political actions--seems to be everywhere these days. Last summer he was in Bangkok and then Cambodia, where he met with a former Khmer Rouge soldier who has opened several music schools in an effort to repair his country's cultural legacy. Chan's work is on the move, too, having been shown recently in Pittsburgh, Sao Paulo, Lyon, Milan, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. 1st [begin strikethrough]Light[end strikethrough] (2005), the first in a much acclaimed series that will eventually total seven videos, appeared at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston before being included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, where it received consistently high marks from critics.

Installed by itself in one of the Whitney's smaller rooms, 1st [begin strikethrough]Light[end strikethrough] was mostly projected on the floor, where it took the shape of a big trapezoid, like a giant window skewed by an oblique, overhead viewing angle. A classic framing device and a metaphorical boundary between the real and the fictive, the window, in one form or another, has anchored much of Chart's work. Within its frame in 1st [begin strikethrough]Light[end strikethrough], black silhouetted objects--cars, iPods, bicycles, train coaches, buses, wires, and telephone posts that are also crosses--float upward toward heaven while birds traverse the field. Similarly silhouetted human figures, however, plummet downward, singly and in twos and threes, some holding hands like the heartbreaking couple that jumped from one of the burning World Trade Center towers. Though these appear to be the filmed shadows of real things, they are in fact all digitally drawn and animated. Says Chan, by way of explanation, "There are no such things as 'actual objects' in art." The silently flickering black shapes are augmented by slowly shifting color overlays, which fade in and out in a rainbow sequence that also reflects across two adjacent walls. Chan links this sequence to the diurnal cycle: sunset, night to sunrise, day, and back; the line through "Light" in the series' titles, Chan explains, is "the most succinct way of describing what the piece is: light and light that has been struck out." (1)

As well as addressing acts of terror like 9/11, Chan was concerned, more generally, with beginnings and ends, the sacred and the profane, temptation and renunciation. Moreover, 1st [begin strikethrough]Light[end strikethrough] (and perhaps the series as a whole; on that point he equivocates) not only invokes the seven days of creation but also refers to the Christian concept of the Rapture, which asserts that true believers will be saved and ascend to heaven in the course of the Second Coming--and the end of the world. In the skeptic's "reverse Rapture" that 1st [begin strikethrough]Light[end strikethrough] pictures, inanimate things ascend while people fall. Not entirely without optimism, though "interested in religion only as a perverse strain of politics," Chan dryly remarks, "If Jesus comes, he might just save our objects and leave us behind."

Born in Hong Kong in 1973 and raised in Nebraska--which might be one reason he's so attracted to opposites--Chan recently had his first solo museum show, one of the exhibitions chosen to inaugurate the spacious new building for the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, which opened Apr. 30. Called "Present Tense," Chart's survey was selected by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, curator of American and contemporary art at the Blanton. It consisted of the digital video projections My birds ... trash ... the future (2004) and 2nd [begin strikethrough]Light[end strikethrough] (2005), and two series of inkjet prints: studies for My birds (2004) along with the "Constellation" series (2005).

My birds ... is an animated, two-channel projection that the indefatigable Chan made completely on his own, spending 14 hours and more a day in front of his computer creating its appealingly crisp, anime-style imagery. A complex 16 1/2-minute video, it was shown at the "Greater New York" show at P.S.1 in Queens in 2005 and was the de facto centerpiece of "Present Tense." Conceived as a set of oppositions, My birds ... uses its deceptively cheerful style to depict a bleak, dystopic world, one that is both sexually charged and sterile. In this barren place, all civilized values are upended or mocked, and traces of humanity are seen only in predatory animals that appear, then disappear--not in the human protagonists, who include the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and the rapper Biggie Smalls (both murder victims) and several suicide bombers. Another inherent opposition characterizes its presentation format. My birds ... is a double-sided projection: one side is a frontal view, while the other presents the action from the rear. Since the viewer can only see one side at a time, knowledge is frustratingly incomplete, which compounds the narrative's impression of fragmentation, dislocation, uncertainty and anxiety.