Inhabiting Chan’s nearly six-hour video, there is something powerful about watching so much black against white/light. In Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Domination of Black,” Stevens represents the scene of a universe turning upon its speaker, crushing the speaker of the poem with its chaotic density. There is a similar effect in Chan’s video. One starts to feel overwhelmed at moments—like the universe is turning on you. All that black does dominate inasmuch as seeing the black (i.e. negative space) affects the senses. I felt profoundly tired after watching Chan's video for a few hours. Perhaps Chan’s use of negative space over such a long duration contributed to my sense of weariness.

The question I kept asking myself watching Chan's video was: why Sade? The press release for the show states that for the past few years Chan has been making work exclusively after the Marquis. One reason (that has two names) seems obvious: Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration remains Chan's central foil, and as such Chan will probably be remembered and studied as one of the most important American artists––if not the iconic American artist––of the Bush era. That the Bush administration broke with the Geneva accords, encouraging torture among its military and governmental agencies, is a source of guilt and shame that the United States has yet to properly resolve––neither through symbolic exchange or legal retribution. One can only hope an aesthetic practice like Chan's signals the beginning of a process of desublimation that can properly deal with the United States' ongoing crimes against humanity.

But we are also living in a time of virtuality, and the pornographic is one of the predominant mediums of the virtual. Throughout his writings and interviews, Chan makes reference to the primacy of Lacanian cultural theory for the past twenty years. This primacy does not seem a coincidence given the central idea behind Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject: that the subject's "reality" is a construction of what he or she "imagines," whether this takes the form of a belief structure, fantasy, or ideology. Pornography has always been an exemplary scene of imaginal encounter. And so I think Chan chose the Marquis de Sade as muse because Sade represents an age of both extreme cruelty and virtuality (the fact that what we imagine constructs what we believe rather than the reverse). In an age in which torture is permitted by one of the most civilized societies in the world, language cannot help but suffer, reduced to a vehicle and byproduct of injustice. In the early stages of any totalitarian society, language is the first victim. Chan points to this fact through his most recent show.