The Story Behind the Work
The Way We See the World
Anne works in two strikingly different modes: calligraphic works drawing on philosophical texts and Zen expressions, and vivid, character-based paintings with a pop sensibility. The contrast between them is immediately apparent. What is less obvious is the question they share: how do we perceive the world, and what shapes the way we see it?
In Big Sister Is Watching You, a girl wearing sunglasses stands against a patterned floral background. The title may bring to mind the surveillance depicted in George Orwell’s 1984: Nineteen Eighty-Four. It invites us to see the girl through that association, shaping our interpretation before we have fully considered the image itself.
But what, exactly, are we looking at?
Are we responding to the colours and shapes in the painting? Or are we seeing the associations evoked by the title, along with the knowledge and values we have accumulated over time? We may think we are simply looking at a painting, when our perception is already shaped by our own assumptions and interpretations.
Is seeing simply a matter of taking in what is before our eyes?
A similar question emerges in another of Anne’s works, A Note.
The text in A Note comes from Chapter 12 of the Dao De Jing, the ancient Chinese philosophical text traditionally attributed to Laozi (老子). The chapter reflects on how the pursuit of sensory stimulation—through colours, sounds, flavours, and rare or desirable objects—can ultimately cloud our senses and judgement.
Rather than rejecting sensory pleasure itself, the passage invites us to consider how the constant pursuit of external stimulation can distance us from our own capacity to perceive and discern.
In A Note, layers of text overlap, with characters emerging faintly from beneath surfaces that seem almost to obscure them. They hover between visibility and disappearance. The work evokes the experience of losing sight of something important, then gradually recognising what has been there all along.
Seen alongside A Note, Big Sister Is Watching You takes on another dimension. The girl’s appearance and the painting’s vivid colours are no longer simply elements that catch the eye. They also prompt us to consider how images attract our attention and shape our responses.
What catches our eye. What draws us in. What, through repeated exposure, we gradually come to take for granted.
Amid all this, what do we actually see—and what do we overlook?
The two works approach the same questions of perception and value from different directions. A Note draws on philosophical thought and language, while Big Sister Is Watching You explores these questions through its vivid visual expression. Yet both invite us to reflect on how we see the world and what shapes our understanding of it.
A Note does not provide an explanation for Big Sister Is Watching You, nor does it resolve the questions the painting raises. Instead, each work offers a different perspective from which to approach the other. Seen in relation to each other, the two works may reveal something neither reveals on its own.
Gallery Rin offers this interpretation of Anne’s contrasting works as an invitation to look beyond the act of interpretation itself: to consider not only what we see, but also what informs our way of seeing.
Making sense of a work of art also means examining the assumptions we bring to it.
What emerges in the space between these two works is for each viewer to discover for themselves. In doing so, we may come to see not only the works differently, but also our own ways of seeing the world.