Wah Yan Au
Wild Boar Runs into a Shopping Mall

31.07.17 25.07.17

Au Wah Yan is interested in visual storytelling, working in the area of drawing, printmaking and comic illustration while exploring the ambiguity of the fictional and the real in narrative approach. She has been interested in Buenos Aires from an early age, since her mother showed her a cartoon of Mafalda translated into Chinese. The artist herself explains that it was through Mafalda that she came up with concepts that would mark her ideology and social consciousness as “communism,” “socialism” and “capitalism”. Wah Yan is an artist that defines herself as related both to the most exposed presence that activism implies and to the more introspective movement that her individual artwork needs (illustration, drawing, printmaking, etc.).

During her residency at ´ace, she worked on an illustrated etching book that features allegory and examines the form of sequential narrative.

ARTIST STATEMENT

How do people try to connect, transform and recreate with one’s story. Much of her monochrome charcoal and pencil drawings reveal an exploration of the inner psyche of personal experience and social engagement in her early years. The theatrical images are the accumulation of fragmented imagination and social observation, like city-fables that represent the chaos of modern lives. You can find how living creatures live awkwardly through the imagery as metaphor. Her narratives are inspired by anecdotes of the places, allegory of the animals, folk tales, daily news and literary adaptations.

BIO
Wah Yan Au
1984 | Hong Kong.

EDUCATION
2007 | BA in Fine arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

EXHIBITIONS
2013 | Fragments, Hong Kong.

Related Activities

Open Studio

Open Studio #8
Artists in Dialogue

25.08.17

On Friday, August 25th, 2017 we held an Open Studio as a closing to the residency period of ´acePIRAR | Artist-in-Residency International Program. The four artists-in-residency presented their works in process in each of their workspaces, generating dialogues, suggestions and relevant contributions from those who visited us.

Wah Yan Au (Hong Kong) showed her artist book in process and the photolithographies she did, and she also shared her research experience on bookstores, independent publishers of Buenos Aires and Latin American authors.

Serene Dakak, sub30 artist from Palestine, presented her project Selfobject and spoke about how each different context affects her work, her self-portrait and her self-reflection.

Michael Claire (USA) was working in The Tower, and there he showed the significant amount of works he produced during his month in Buenos Aires. Michael took the walking tour of this city as a starting point for the artworks, in one month he used only once the public transport (which is very significant, taking into account the size of Buenos Aires). He drew on maps all his travels and took this as a formal basis for his artwork.

Bárbara Alperowicz, an artist from Buenos Aires who made a 5-days micro-Residency, also talked about her brief but intense time at ´ace, about her visual and conceptual work on what disappears or re-locates and her formal and technical search to capture or reflect on the topic.

4 artists from distant places, showed many points and interests in common from the first day. All interested by the social role of the artist in the contemporary world and very committed to their production.

In addition, the international projects El Pliego (organized by the Grupo dx5 of the University of Vigo in Pontevedra, Spain in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Quebec in Canada) and Self-portraits 9, Montana State University session, continue on exhibit.