Annie Wong

The playgrounds of our imagination

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Hussain Sulais What color are you? اي لون أنت؟

part of a series on Surreal
Jan 25, 2019

21:54

Need a GIF for your period? Headexplodie’s stickers got you covered

When multimedia artist Annie Wong was growing up in Texas, she was labeled as three things: a shy, Chinese girl. Surrounded by extroverts at school (she has photographic evidence), she found solace in building her own characters and stories in her school notebooks, crafting surreal worlds that helped her process the real world. After she left Texas for art school (and the Bay), she landed a job at Oakland’s own Children’s Fairyland where she founded the Art & Restoration Department to restore the park and its art and also ran puppet shows, moving her work from just 2 dimensions into the 3rd (and 4th!) dimensions. Nowadays Annie work heavily centers on anthropomorphism and humor, creating stop-motion gifs for sharing on the web. Ranging from funny mini-jokes like what an ice-cream cone would sound like if it could make a noise (screaming!) to work about taboo issues like menstruation (“Ovary-Actions”), Annie’s work always comes from a place of reality but quickly takes the audience somewhere else altogether.

About the speaker

Annie Wong, a.k.a. Headexplodie, hand crafts mixed media for the digital world. Her work includes short form videos, GIFs, stop motion content and more. Annie has a diverse background in the arts, including children’s book illustration, puppeteering, scenic painting, art direction and fabrication. Her specialty is stop motion that is cute, silly, weird and sometimes creepy, but is always focused on building human connections. She is a Giphy Featured Artist with over 5 billion views and her Ovary Actions project has received global coverage. Annie holds a B.F.A. from California College of the Arts and a Master’s Degree in Animation from the Academy of Art University. You can find Annie’s work at www.headexplodie.co and follow her on Instagram @headexplodie.