When Yansu Wang moved to Italy in 2015 to study, a friend gifted her a notebook with a map of Milan inside. From that moment, Yansu began creating a personal Junk Journal (a notebook filled with collages using recycled materials) narrating her daily life through collage. The paper materials she uses come from the most varied sources: receipts, movie tickets, brochures, fines, instruction manuals, hotel Wi-Fi passwords written on scraps of paper, candy wrappers, and much more. In the exhibition, you will see a selection of her pop-up books, as well as new ones created in collaboration with Pineider, that lent its precious papers and notebooks for Yansu Wang’s new pieces.

In Europe, and more broadly in the Western world, we are accustomed to thinking of collage in the art field as a technique explored at the beginning of the 20th century by Cubism and Futurism, later by Dadaism, Surrealism, and then Pop Art. In reality, collage has a long tradition in China as well, where paper was invented in 200 BCE and subsequently developed as an artistic medium in both China and Japan from the 10th century onward.

In China, a distinctive artistic reinterpretation emerged through the Bapo compositions, or “Eight Brokens.” This technique, which emerged in China around the mid-19th century and continued to develop until 1949, is considered distinct from traditional painting and calligraphy, using various paper elements to deconstruct cultural concepts and create images with ever-new juxtapositions on paper. These compositions included a variety of elements, from calligraphic texts to inscriptions on seals, but also torn, burned, or decomposing letters. The creator who layered these elements showcases their skill and intellect by incorporating numerous hidden comments, aphorisms, or wordplays to provoke thought.

In 2017, an important exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston presented the first formal study of this art thanks to Nancy Berliner (Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art at MFA in Boston), who came across this unusual painting during a visit to a flea market in Taiwan in the summer of 1978. Her tireless effort brought to life a rare opportunity to discover, in the curator’s words, “a historic and radically modern-looking art form that had never been recorded, and that was all but forgotten.”