Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacob Wan.
Jacob, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I moved to Orlando from China for school in 2014 without knowing what my passion or dream is. After learning about art from the inspirational professors at the University of Central Florida, I have committed to being a conceptual book artist, who explores identity, sexuality, introspection through mixed media books.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The language barrier, cultural difference, and unfriendly comments sometimes. Overall, it has been an interesting journey.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Being Chinese and gay, I explore sexuality, relationship, and balance from personal experience through mixed-media book arts. As a contemporary bookbinder, I craft conceptual books as expressions of emotions, sequences of consciousness, and collections of moments. By experimenting with the materiality of the page, thread, and cover, I deploy personal memories to discover the identity, portray solitude, and celebrate the importance of oneself.
My books are inspired by introspection, imagination, and compassion. Through color, mythology, and symbolism, I work with textiles, embroidery, papermaking, and other techniques to showcase the desires, tenderness, and fragility of manhood, homosexuality, and Romanticism. My ideas often appear late at night, and my creative process involves improvisation. It helps me to keep the marks organically to mimic the subconsciousness, and I adjust the pages by editing, continue by building, and explore by combining paper, threads, and other objects. The journey of making a book is similar to puzzling, starting with fragmental ideas and matching them in a meaningful position that leads to a final answer.
Along with stitching traditional bound books with handmade paper and assembling sculptural books with unconventional materials, and I am interested in creating book-like spaces to evoke an immersive atmosphere for the audiences. I aspire to bring the sense of ceremony of reading a book into my mixed-media book installation; the viewers enter the space like they open a book, and they close the cover when they exit the space for a poetic experience. Through curating the different forms of books in purposeful location based on the site structure, I create an implied book that the audience’s walking flow is the thread to bind the pages of books together as a whole.
My current research focuses on books in expanded fields and gender studies. I explore the materiality and challenge the concept of Book Arts. Through expanding the structure of a book into sculptures, installations, and time arts, I create conceptual books to foster a comforting utopia for the audience to embrace the vulnerability of otherness. I make books that nobody else can make.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Share with me their stories, involved with my art practice, and follow me on social media to see my new works. 🙂
Contact Info:
- Email: zhefuwanart@gmail.com
- Website: www.jacobzwan.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacobzwan/
