Lancanian cultural theory has often been charged with being overly discursive, prioritizing language over the bodily “real,” reducing the body to a set of language effects and a neo-Cartesian formula. Whereas the primacy of the animated image of Chan's video produces a bodily effect (the black squares affecting their viewer over the course of six hours), Chan's other works in his show perform something altogether different. These works consist of drawings deriving from Matisse, Mark Lombardi, and Cageian-Fluxus scores, and as such form a dialogue with their sources.

In the Cagian-Fluxus scores, Chan's wish is to score pornographic language, as though to recall a language of repetition back to the body through performance—to thus exorcise or merely exercise this reduction of common language? Many of the scores appear blank (just bars of sheet music), and as such seem to await inscription, or perhaps interpretation (being played). This use of scoring is provocative to me as a way of evoking the body of the audience—their potential to sing or utter—as I believe many Fluxus and intermedia scores of the 60s and 70s also do.

In another drawing one sees the relations of characters from The 120 Days of Sodom drawn diagrammatically, not unlike Mark Lombardi's drawings that chart geopolitical and economic flows of power. Such drawings playfully historicize the relations among Sade's characters, showing there to be lines of force and hierarchy from which Sadist persecutions originate. Doing so, Chan recalls Sade back from the writer’s literary-philosophical predominance, inflecting Sadeian categories through a set of historical relationships.

In a set of drawings, drawings which could be after Matisse but also could be a reference to Bruce Nauman's pornographic neon sculptures in which figures give each other head and point guns at one another and bodies holographically overlap in sexual poses. However, iconoclastically, once again Chan recalls pornography (the virtual) to the body, mediating pornographic perception through traditionally "high-art" drawing techniques. This mediation seems crucial for experiencing the body again, pornography being a kind of erasure or etherizing of the body in repetition.

Chan’s latest showing also consists of large-scale drawings of "fonts" invented by Chan. These drawings are in conjunction with a computer keyboard in which all of the keys have been replaced by gravestones and an actual computer in which one can play with the fonts and generate their own text. The fonts derive from pornographic phrases and words. I am not sure exactly how Chan generated the fonts, but it would seem that the fonts were conceived by a procedure (a computer program that equates key strokes with phrases and words). When one types the capital and lower case letters of the keyboard, as well as the numbers, comma, period, and questions mark keys, one generates sentences based on the language Chan has programmed.

Using this computer procedure, Chan has rewritten works by John Maynard Keynes, Gertrude Stein and others (and one can read these texts at Chan's website, National Philistine. The large-scale drawings feature "decoder" legends showing keystrokes and their graphic counterparts.  It is interesting that Chan has chosen to use drawings to explicate his fonts. Is this to sell a collectable art object (where the more dematerialized ones might have sufficed) or as yet another form of mediation? One suspects both.