With expositions of her work done all around the world, from Hawaii to Switzerland, Andrea Wan is booming thanks to the internet.
Drawing came as a hobby to avoid boredom for the illustrator and visual artist born in Hong Kong, raised in Vancouver and based in Berlin. Been a single child of 2 graphic designers, she recounts being in her parents studio and drawing to pass the time and to play with their art supply. How simple and amazing is that?
Graduated in filmmaking, the recognition for her art came also by chance: her graduation film was all hand drawn and people suggested that she should invest in a career as an illustrator and visual artist. The film got published by a Canadian website and thanks to the internet she has built a successful career.
Fruit of a fluid and spontaneous creation process, her work explores a diverse and unusual catalog of themes, all represented with a surrealistic feel, allowing a lot of room for interpretation. In my personal opinion, that is partially what renders it its magic. The author says that all the pieces are part of a visual diary and, perhaps, different representations of herself, but regardless of how personal it all sounds, the expectator can project his/her own personality and mental processing in a lot of her work.
In her Mirror Mirror series I can see a search for self-knowledge, where every draw reflects a feeling or a perception, like laziness or overwhelm, but, do I know if that was what she was thinking or trying to represent? Absolutely not and that is beautiful. She presents her drawing with no big concept or elaborate descriptions, allowing us to join in and instigating a reflection about what is being said there.
In this world of excess information and chaos we live now, every once in a while we stumble upon something that presents such an interesting thematic, unique aesthetics and genuine self-expression that it ends up getting us to think and it is reinvigorating!
