Wuon-Gean Ho wins prize for Orchis Library Book series
Congratulations to CFPR Research Associate, Wuon-Gean Ho, who won second prize for her Orchis Book series in the VACA ‘Books of Desire’ show in Ravenna, Italy, in December.
There are nine books in the series called Orchis Library. Each book started from the notion of the body as a book. Each book contains a single print that spans three mountain folds and two valley folds, depicting a dark mass of abstract bodies, fabric and foliage that centres on an internal landscape of touch. Rather than a photographic or logical view, the shape and forms that appear are generated from a depiction of elusive things such as the feelings and the sensation of being inside one’s own skin. The visual representation of body position, muscle memory, and distortion is focused around a point that radiates from an inner eye of the narrator, an anamorphic central point that tilts the perspective against gravity.
Using a simple accordion fold allows for the translation of page to volume. The books invite the viewer to interact with the pages in order to emphasize or reduce sequences of events. Turning the page stretches limbs, demonstrates syncopation, crushes and expands the timeline. The landscapes that result flow and merge from bodies into plants and flowers, jungle and folded fabric, between figures that are solid and those that seem to shimmer and disappear.
