Many implied words hide between the lines. Vol. 2 Double Space is an exhibition that displays Jacob Z. Wan's conceptual books to explore the intimacy of the LGBTQ experience. As a contemporary bookbinder, Wan uses traditional bound books with handmade paper, book objects, and book installation from bedroom objects to evoke an immersive atmosphere to express the importance of oneself.
Boy and Moonlight explore sexuality, consciousness, and relationships with others and within the self.
This collection of books is made of intimate materials from my bedroom to express my desire and struggle for love as a Chinese gay man. Pillowtalk is a traditionally bound book made with handmade paper that includes pieces of clothes from my boyfriends and found texts from love novels to explore my internal thoughts and longings. Underaware is a mixed-media series of shadowbox “pages” that enclose pairs of men’s underwear. By arranging and displaying the underwear in meaningful positions, the gestures convey the complexities of that particular relationship and how it has shaped my demand, understanding, and perspective of love. Bedsheets are the most intimate objects we interact with as they contain comforts, physical evidence of identity, and many personal late-night thoughts. Through the use of hand-dyed bedsheets in Overnight, I create a book with pages as a physical maze of bedsheets hanging from the space. The viewers are invited to walk through the book with a sense of “hide and seek” which implies my personal feelings as an LGBTQ+ member.
In Boy and Moonlight, I create an interactive “bedroom” that provides an atmosphere of intimacy, sensitivity, and closeness for viewers to connect to the importance of loving the self.
“As a contemporary bookbinder, I craft conceptual books to explore identity, sexuality, and human relationships from being a Chinese gay man. My mixed media handbound books, book-alike objects, and book installations portray solitude, delineate intimacy, and evoke an immersive atmosphere. By experimenting with the materiality of the page, thread, and cover, I deploy personal memories to celebrate the importance of oneself.
My books are inspired by introspection, imagination, and compassion. I incorporate image-making and object-making, papermaking, fiber/textile, and other techniques to showcase the desires, tenderness, and fragility of the LGBTQ community with color, mythology, and symbolism. Improvisation helps me to keep the process organically to mimic the subconsciousness, and I adjust the pages by editing, continue by building, and explore by combining. 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.
To me, books are expressions of emotions, sequences of consciousness, and collections of moments. A human is a book; the name is the title, the appearance is the cover, and the memories are the pages. 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 and intimate experience. Through curating the different forms of books in purposeful locations based on the site structure, I design an implied book that the audience’s walking flows as the thread to bind the pages of books together as a whole.
Currently, my 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, social engagement practice, and time arts, I create conceptual books to foster a comforting utopia for the audience to embrace the vulnerability of otherness.”
Jacob Z. Wan is a contemporary bookbinder who creates mixed-media conceptual books to celebrate the importance of oneself. His books have been collected internationally and exhibited in Florida Biennial, International Book Art Exhibition, Germany, and China. Wan has received his BFA and MFA from the University of Central Florida, and he currently resides in Jacksonville, FL.