Field Notes
The bartender wiped the counter, placed a glass down, and carefully added two cubes of ice.
With total focus, he poured the soda slowly, making sure it flowed between the ice and the glass without touching either.
All this, for soda water.
The way you do something is the way you do everything.
The book is written by Yvonne Xu, and illustrated by Shu (Germaine Chong). It was later shortlisted at the D&AD Awards, Museum of Avant Garde, and Award 360.
Here’s the foreword I wrote for the book:
We need it to survive.
It is everywhere and is as important as air.
It is formless and ageless. And practically
colourless, tasteless, and odourless.
Water gives life but
can also be a cause of death.
It can be gentle,
and violent.
It can heal and rejuvenate,
and wear out and damage.
It is ubiquitous and indispensable.
It is both the simplest and most complex thing on earth.
A substance that makes all life on earth possible.
Yet, most people don’t think about water. It is something that we only think about when it is absent.
The most obvious things are often the hardest to see.
Water is exactly that.
Hidden in plain sight.
It is easy to know the things that we know,
and difficult to know the things we don’t know
that we don’t know.
In June 2022, an idea dawned on me: what if there was a space to imagine the hidden possibilities of water and to make the unknown known to more people?
A place to experience this visible but unseen substance through all our senses:
touch,
taste,
smell,
sound and
sight.
As I thought more about the space, it became clear that we first needed to start with a deep dive into water as a medium and material. To examine the many ways that it has influenced art, design, food, and culture.
It is with this deceptively simple yet complex task, that I turned to my friend and long-time collaborator, Yvonne Xu, to be the author of this book.
For over a decade, through the work that we do at Anonymous and A Design Film Festival, Yvonne has been an irreplaceable collaborator as a writer, researcher, and thinker.
She has an uncanny ability to make
the complex simple and to articulate ideas
in a way that is easily understood
and inspires action.
In many ways, Yvonne is like water.
Adaptable.
Calm.
Clear.
Quiet.
Reflective.
Transparent.
Understated.
I am grateful to her for saying yes to writing this book (and also for not ignoring my calls and emails even after years of being agonized by my odd ideas).
This isn’t just a book about water.
It is about seeing beyond the obvious and increasing our awareness of how little we know about the world.
My hope is that this book will offer you a new perspective of water. From something we don’t think much about to a material and medium with new hidden possibilities.
Found is a new series of field notes on what can be learned from the objects around us.
—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous