Join us in the Bookshop and meet artist Yan Wang Preston who is presenting her photobook Forest, published by Hatje Cantz. From 18.45 Yan Wang Preston will be in conversation with writer and curator Zelda Cheatle, who also wrote a text for Forest.
Forest documents an artist on the trail of tree migration and ecology recovery:
In 2013 Yan Wang Preston made an incisive observation: in the small village of Xialiu stood an over three-hundred-year-old tree, Frank, in all of its glory, right in the centre of a community that was, at the time of Preston’s visit, being coerced into moving so that a dam could be built in that location. Three months later, no trace of the village or the tree could be seen. The residents had moved up the mountain. And the seventy-ton tree? It was sold for twenty-five-thousand Euros to a hotel in a nearby county, Binchuan. Preston found the tree, divested of all its branches and leaves and bandaged in plastic, inside the skeleton of the hotel, which was still under construction. In China, the country where cities are springing up, transplanting and re-constructing nature are big businesses.
In the photo series Forest Preston spent eight years following many uprooted creatures that are now in concrete deserts.
Yan Wang Preston is a awards-winning British-Chinese artist. Forest won the 1st Prize of Syngenta Photography Award in 2017.
Bookshop, Thu 10 May, 18.00 - 20.00
Free event, no Booking.
