People's Annual, 2020
Artist Book

In the era of mass online scrutiny, even though there are legal protections for privacy rights, personal information can still be easily accessed online, leading to new ambiguities in personal identity politics. This work uses the artist’s own middle school graduation album as a reference, which has been re-edited and rearranged to create an artist's book.

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Portrait photos, originally intended as key identifiers of individual features, have their most important facial details obscured by QR codes. When viewers scan the QR code, the page links to the name of the person in the photo, which, when entered into a Google search, reveals related information. Here, the uniqueness of the individual seems to be replaced by the blanket search capabilities of the internet. In the overwhelming flood of information, it becomes difficult to hide one’s traces, seemingly confirming Andy Warhol’s famous statement: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

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With a carefully crafted binding that contrasts with the digital content, the work navigates and plays with the possibilities between "commemoration" and "de-commemoration."