Annie Wang
The Mother as a Creator
As an artist, Mother is wise in its creation. Mother not only brings forth life but also a continuous matrix of experiences between Mother and Child. Motherhood is a long-term process filled with a myriad of complex emotions. This complexity cannot be solely expressed through saccharine images of Mother and Child, nor by the image of the embodied Mother willingly sacrificing herself for the sake of her children.
All these motherhood stereotypes are to Annie Wang a tedious and inevitable sermon that offers her no solace. It is from this that the original motivation for this series derives. Starting from the first self-portrait taken in 2001, a day before giving birth, she and her son would take a new photo together in front of the previous formal family photo every time they had a common life experience. Thus, the different stages of life and appearances merge to form a single layer.
These Mother and Child photos, create a dialogue compressed into a peculiar space. From this dimension emerges a complicated, fragmented, and diverse recording of motherhood. Annie has been working on this project for 22 years and will continue to do so, using “mise en abyme” as an autobiographical approach to writing history. Hoping that through the accumulation of years and the reappearance of her own motherhood, she can reverse the stereotype that mothers must sacrifice, and thus redefine motherhood. She wants to demonstrate that within the same period of motherhood, the roles of artist and mother can transform from a difficult coexistence into a fusion.
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang (Taipei, China)
She obtained her PhD in Art from the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. Throughout the year, she is intensely focused on issues related to female identity in her photography, oil paintings, multimedia art, and art instruction. She is the founder of Ching Tien Art Space and is an assistant professor at National Dong Hwa University.
Her artworks went viral and sparked numerous features and great interest abroad. “In these photos, Wang asserts her active role in creating another life, reframing motherhood as a great creative effort,” says The New Yorker. The BBC stated that her works “subvert and transcend the stereotype of motherhood.” The Chinese publication Portrait Magazine ranked Annie Wang as one of the 25 most influential people of 2018.
In recent years, she has exhibited at international photography festivals or large-scale art exhibitions such as the Festival Images Vevey in Switzerland, the International Photography Festival in Australia, “SHERO” at the Tainan Art Museum in Taiwan, the Daegu Photography Biennale in Korea, AIPAD in New York, and Paris Photo in Paris.
