Capital Production Circle

Yu-Chen WangThe Drawing Room | Annotations 1, 2016–2017

Annotations was a series of artist commissions for Drawing Room’s Outset Study. Including 6 artists over a 3-year period, each artist undertook a period of supported residency, researching the library collection to create a work for Outset Study – using the wall, the space, or intervening within the library collection itself.

The work of contemporary artist Yu-Chen Wang asks fundamental questions about human identity at a key point in history, where eco-systems and techno-systems have become inextricably intertwined. At the same time, Yu-Chen’s Taiwanese origins, combined with a London-based career, have created a vision that is personal and autobiographical.

Yu-Chen Wang’s newly commissioned work Annotations 1 combined discoveries from a visit to the remote Taiwanese Pacific Island of Lanyu (literally translated Orchid Island) with her experience of open-ended reading sessions in Outset Study.

The culmination of an intense period of travel and work, these two experiences have enabled the artist to re-engage with her creative process. The resulting work drew a parallel between these two distant and disparate places, which occupy a kindred place in the artist’s mind. It sought to understand such spaces of isolation and meditation, pondering their idiosyncratic systems and obsolete technologies, out of step with the current pace of life, and ultimately probe their generative and regenerative potential.

ON VIEW: 1st August 2016 – 27th January 2017