Ying (Wanying Luo)

INSIDE

among books, body and clothing

As a book artist, I do not want my works to be limited by paper or specific materials. I experimented with form using various materials such as fabric, rubber, metal and combining my life experiences with physical spaces so that the audience could feel my experience and have a more intimate relationship with my work. This experimentation led to a “wearable book” series, where I collaged together a range of colours, materials, fabric, most collected from fashion magazines. I arranged them to order and disorder, overlay, deform, and combined the elements of garments (like a collar, sleeve), to form new visual images and illustrate my understanding of female power.

I used pure, holy white as the primary colour of my book pages. I stitched the collage images with the same white thread needle by needle inside every page, what we can see from the outside is like concealed sewing track – the outline of the internal graphics, to give the viewers time to imagine what inside and then walk closer and check inside. Just like the power from inside the female body is diffusing slowly from the inside to outside. When the viewer enters the space with the book, their action of turning the pages is precisely the same as the action of selecting clothes. At the same time, as a wearable book, every “page” of clothes on the body corresponds to the organs. I used different collage images combined with each organ to tell different stories like they discourse the power and narrates by themselves.