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TEMPER: one hundred brief missives within a character limit
Published by ECU Press
Artist: LAIWAN
Authors: Bopha Chhay
Editor: Kay Higgins
Copy editor: Kate Woolf
Designer: Kay Higgins
Publisher: ECU Press
Binding: Softcover
Dimensions: 16 x 12.5 x 1.5 cm
Page count: 210
Language: English
ISBN: 978 0 921356 50 9
Out of print
The second book in ECU Press’s Reflector series, TEMPER: one hundred brief missives within a character limit springs from an ongoing online project by LAIWAN, in which the artist uses the constraints and possibilities of social media to deliver mini-manifestoes on liberation, doubt, activism, privilege, environmental degradation, protest, racism, and art. TEMPER chooses key moments from this stream of contemplation and provocation from 2019 to 2021 and re-presents them in print, accompanied by Bopha Chhay’s essay “Keeping Doom at the Edges.”
Biographies
LAIWAN is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in apartheid Rhodesia. Her art training began at the Emily Carr College of Art & Design (1983), and she returned to academia to receive an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts (1999). Recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 VIVA Award, 2021 Emily Award from Emily Carr University, recent Canada Council and BC Arts Council Awards, and the 2008 Vancouver Queer Media Artist Award, Laiwan served on numerous arts juries, exhibits regularly, curates projects in Canada, the US, and Zimbabwe, is published in anthologies and journals, and taught for twenty years at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College (VT/WA, USA). She is based on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations and currently works in the Department of Arts, Reconciliation and Culture at the Vancouver Park Board.