Exhibition Publication
When the curator Li Zhenhua joined the project, he urged Angela Lyn to write about her life for the book publication. Rooms without true human stories are merely cold walls – he underlined. Weaving stories between the artist’s own life and themes inherent to the baroque palazzo formed a mosaic complex and simple at once. It is the human thread that connects us through time.
The challenging task to visualise this mosaic in a book, with its subtle layers of story-telling, was met with enthusiasm and interest by graphic designer Jonas Niedermann from TGG, St Gallen. Working in close collaboration with the artist, approaching the book from inside-out, from content to form, he created a language that reflects the spirit of this exhibition. Andrea Rossetti, a well-known art photographer from Milan, adds to the book, capturing the dialogue between the 17th-century rooms and Angela Lyn’s art with sensitivity and quietness.
Richard Bird accompanies Angela with the demanding job of editing various texts, initially written in English, Chinese, Italian, French and German, a mix reflecting the artist’s life and background. This colourful book is a human portrait reflecting on the past, facing the now and looking towards the future. Lyn writes – a single story, whether it is mine, yours, or anyone’s, absorbed within the perspective of this vast centuries-old building, is just another dot in time. And yet, looking into the cracks of the walls, listening to the layers of paint: one single story suddenly becomes part of the whole. Stories lived are the transient marks of time that make history fluid, and the act of telling them becomes a means to connect the past to the present.
