Gwangju International Center

SPEAKER: Annie Lai Kuen WAN

CO-WRITER:​ Dettya

GIC TALK DATE: April 23, 2016

GIC TALK TITLE: Reading BOOK Narrating TIME - Six work by Annie WAN

Ms. Annie Wan is an international media artist who was born in Hong Kong, Her work examines the relationship between the material and the immaterial and also between herself and her surroundings. For example, she uses ceramics to represent the passage of time and how that affects books. Ms. Annie Wan concern is not with inspecting material civilization nor about formal replication, rather it is with change the dynamics of transformation and the transience of time. The ceramic works, as a tangible form and record, embody the subtle changes of life.

Ms. Annie Wan who devoted herself to art making and to researching a conceptual approach to molding began her presentation by explaining about the reason why in the title of this presentation “BOOK” and “TIME” was written in capital letters because the main topic of her artworks that she explained about is mainly related with both of this things. She also pointed out that some of her artworks. In her Trilogy of a Book, Ms. Annie Wan makes clay replicas of books in three different ‘states’. Fragile Book represents a banned book in China, which cannot be opened and has lost its content, but still appears in a bookshop when it is impressed with a barcode. Organic Book references what writer Carlos Ruiz Zafrón called the “soul” of a book, which embodies the soul of the writer and all its readers; in Ms. Annie Wan work, grass grows in the book, as evidence of this soul as life. Fossil Book was created by coating an entire book and its pages with clay and firing it. The paper was burnt during firing, leaving only the ceramic ‘fossil’.

In Infinitive Horizon/Ruin, different types of clay are used to replicate 180 discarded books. Ms. Annie Wan paints wet clay over the pages and fills in the gaps within the book. After the firing process, the papers disintegrate while the clay fillings are left behind. Some of these ceramic books are toasted to whiteness, while others are over-burnt and charred. Some look like eroded debris cemented to form strata of sedimentary rocks, while others are chipped, scarred, and sparsely covered with grass. Wan lays out these books in an orderly composition that sets a tone of desolation. Ms. Annie Wan gesture of painting wet clay over the pages is an imitated act of reading between the lines, flipping through the pages, and reflecting upon the message. The work embodies the reading process, which involves preserving useful information and deleting the useless embracing the birth of new ideas and the crumbling of old concepts. It becomes, then, the ruins of these books, which were discarded due to their obsolescence. Yet, they still withstand the test of time in this ceramic form of remembrance.

Ms. Annie Wan continued with explaining about her ceramic book: 

 Time Regained, six black ceramic books made from six volumes of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust,

 Phenomenon of Times 

Ms. Annie Wan explores our relationship to time through history books, objects that are receptacles of the sequential narratives through which humanity constructs its existence in linear time. With a gestural regularity reminiscent of the act of reading, the artist brushed every page of the nine-volume History of India by 19th century Indian civil servant and historian Romesh C Dutt (published in 1906) with clay. She then fired the clay-coated books till all the paper burned off, leaving just the ceramic shell. Wan thus erases all traces of an oft-recited account of the past even as she records its demise in scorched earth. According to the artist, the past, present and future reveal simultaneously in these sculptures. By interrogating our linear relationship to time through them, she is reflecting on the “lightness or nothingness of time”.

 Colourful Hong Kong

Colourful Hong Kong is created by Ms. Annie Wan within the umbrella movement, she said that she grew up in Hong Kong when it was a British colony. After Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1997, cultural and political changes have been taking places through these years. Life and value change. In 2014, During the “Umbrella Movement”, Ms. Annie Wan came across two books, “彩色香港1940s-60s” & “彩色香港1970s-80s” (Colourful Hong Kong 1940s-60s & 1970s-80s) in bookstore, which were collections of historical colour photographs of Hong Kong. Confronting these photographs, she was overwhelmed and full of nostalgia, she said that she missed Hong Kong at that time.

 The Road We Travelled

 72 pieces 

Ms. Annie Wan explained if this work was made from 72 travel and entertainment magazines in Hong Kong, which were transformed into fragile ceramic books in different spectrums.

From what was learned from these, Ms. Annie Wan is passionate about Hong Kong and its history. She wants her art to be democratic, involving the community, rather than for the market; to be for the many rather than for the few. It is art that stems from social engagement and from ideas about finding a more sustainable way to live.