Annie Lai Kuen Wan’s (b. 1961, Hong Kong) commissioned project for gb11, Every Day A Rainbow, focuses specifically on the neighborhood surrounding the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall. During her visit to Gwangju in April 2016, Wan bought a variety of commodity objects from shops in the neighborhood, which were cast into plaster molds in her Hong Kong studio. These objects, alongside some that are of particular meaning to Wan personally, such as her nephew’s nursing bottle, her favorite beer, her old English textbook etc., are then slip-cast into Korean celadon, a transparent pale-green glaze that is most well known in eastern Asia, including Korea, China, and Japan. Through July and August 2016, Wan collaborated with Gwangju-based celadon master Dongjin Son, working in his workshop and using his gas kiln to recast the objects. These celadon objects are then placed back into the six different shops from which Wan first purchased them. Outside of the exhibition hall, Wan erected a small kiosk most commonly used by shoe shiners and repairers, but filled it with commodities purchased from the neighborhood shops instead, and maybe an object or two purchased from her home city. The objects inside the kiosk also include some of Wan’s existing artworks that are inserted into this new commission as an intervention. The neighborhood of the Gwangju Biennale Hall, as well as the larger city itself, becomes the site of Wan’s inquiry and exploration into how people, their living environments, and art create and become transformative contact zones for one another. Primarily working in ceramics, Wan’s preoccupation with the medium is in its materiality and transformative process. Apart from the materiality of ceramics and how it can alter human relationships, Wan is also interested in ceramics as a craft that links tradition with contemporary life. She has worked extensively with ceramic casts of objects of everyday life—shoes, books, radios, and canned food. Many of Wan’s transformed daily objects have been displayed as part of exhibitions and collaborative projects with supermarkets as well.
self-presentation:
Though I cannot remember when I first drew, I can never forget the fascination by the magical power of art: I just used a pencil to draw a circle, I saw the moon. I further drew lines radiating from the circle, and it became the sun!
When I was a kid, I indulged in the Chinese folk tale "Ma Liang and the Magical Paint Brush (馬良神筆), in which Ma Liang made everything he drew into life. I was very into his adventures after he gained this magical ability. I drew more than I talked in my childhood and my mother said, “This daughter will be an artist!”These words carved in my mind for years...
