ALUMNI/AE ACCOLADES
das Abendmahl (Last Supper), Word Book, ©Paul Chan Studio & Badlands Unlimited
John Yau ’72 is one of eight visual art journalists to receive this year’s $50,000 Rabkin Prize from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Yau has been publishing reviews and essays on art and literature since 1978. He writes for the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend, which he cofounded in 2012. Yau has published monographs on Liu Xiaodong, Thomas Nozkowski, Catherine Murphy, John Philip Taaffe, and Jasper Johns. He is a professor of critical studies in the visual arts department at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. His latest book of poetry, Genghis Chan on Drums, was published in October.
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ON AND OFF CAMPUS
hyperallergic.com
Artist Paul Chan MFA ’03 defies easy categorization. He works with charcoal and on computers, engages politics and erotica, and mixes the ancient with the cutting edge. For Word Book—the first English translation of Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Dictionary for Elementary Schools) by the influential philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—Chan did the illustrations with his nondominant left hand, giving the images an appropriately childlike feel. The dictionary was written in 1925, when Wittgenstein was already famous for Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But the philosopher had become disenchanted, so he left his career behind and taught for six years in an elementary school in rural Austria. There he saw the need for a good dictionary for children and compiled nearly 6,000 words and phrases. It’s easy to see why such a project would interest the Hong Kong–born, Nebraska-raised Chan, who retired from art making shortly after participating in the 2009 Venice Biennale, but returned after his own six-year hiatus with an exhibition in 2015 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Of that show, Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times, “Chan’s work is always surprising and as smart as art gets, which means, among other things, that it’s smart enough not to always give us the art we think we want.” Paul Chan MFA ’03 received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in 2021.
greenenaftaligallery.com/artists/paul-chan
