Gareth Fuller is an artist and explorer. His work acts as a layered gaze into the identity of urban and rural places, transcribing their personal, geographical, and social meanings into what he calls ‘maps of the mind’. The results of these transcriptions are vast and intricate hand-drawn compositions – a series of visual portraits that express his personal and purposeful wanderings.
Emily Hahn, an American journalist and writer, led an adventurous life. Remembered here by a typewriter on the Bund, where she worked for the North China Daily News. The female gender symbol represents her commitment to feminism, and her pet gibbon, which accompanied her to Shanghai’s high society parties, is swinging from the building’s roof.
The first North Korean female pilot is depicted flying through the air. I was told she had dinner with Kim Il Sung in a hidden bunker, inside a wooded valley. Legend has it that black dragons also once lived in the valley, and that they danced in the white clouds.
A fictitious mountain of used facial masks and tolerance has formed, featuring a pagoda with a beacon, shield, and tick.