Level: Beginner/ Intermediate, 18+
Tutors: Wan Lin Chang, Yi Chen Li, Luke M Walker
Date: 13 July – 17 July 2026
Time: 10:00 – 17:00
Cost: £656
- Earlybird: 10% discount if booked by 28 February
- 10% discount available for City & Guilds of London Art School undergraduate, postgraduate, and foundation students, alumni, and staff. Contact summerschool@cityandguildsartschool.ac.uk to receive the discount code.
COURSE OVERVIEW
Led by Taiwanese artists Wan Lin Chang and Yi Chen Li, this five-day summer course invites participants into an
immersive exploration of paper as material and language.
Through mapping, foraging, rubbings, watercolour, charcoal, calligraphic stamp-making and bookbinding, participants build a progressive body of practice. Skills are developed through hands-on experimentation and quiet observation. The programme fosters cross-cultural exchange and a deeper sensitivity to mark, surface, and process. Participants conclude with a cohesive portfolio reflecting both technique and personal inquiry.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Rooted in a history that stretches from ancient Egypt to the Eastern Han dynasty in China, paper carries both time and transmission. While its techniques travelled across the Islamic world and into Europe, today it stands at a quiet threshold—between hand and screen, touch and code. This course invites a return to the territories unique to paper, and to its enduring role in cultural expression.
The programme begins with a guided walk along the River Thames led by local artist and CGLAS Fine Art Tutor Luke M. Walker, whose practice centres on walking and the poetic documentation of place. Participants will map their journeys through gathered fragments—objects, sketches, texts, and images—forming the foundations of their studio- based projects.
Taiwanese artists Wan Lin Chang and Yi Chen Li will then lead a sequence of carefully paced workshops in bookbinding, watercolour, calligraphy, mapping, and rubbings. Together, these practices open pathways into the shared languages of art, craft, and design, with paper as both surface and structure.
This course offers a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary framework through which participants explore traditional Taiwanese applied arts within a contemporary art context. From carving and printing ink stamps to specialist bookbinding and painterly mark-making, the programme cultivates both technical skill and conceptual sensitivity—leaving behind a body of work shaped by hand, movement, and exchange.
What’s included: Paper, pencils, pens, charcoal, stamp-making materials, book binding materials.
What’s not included: Students are encouraged to bring along any materials that they would also like to work with during the week.
ABOUT THE TUTORS:
WAN LIN CHANG is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves quietly between text, memory, identity, cultural space, and the natural world. She holds an MA in Interior and Spatial Design from Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London, and trained in book-structure design at London College of Communication. Distilling complex ideas into restrained, minimalist forms, she works with everyday materials to translate painting, installation, sculpture, and mixed media into subtle, poetic expressions.
Through processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, her work reveals unexpected relationships between ordinary elements. Both experimental and conceptual, Chang has exhibited internationally, exploring the fragile dialogues between space, memory, and time. Her installations and objects invite viewers into moments of quiet attentiveness, where the boundary between the real and the imagined becomes gently unsettled through shared and personal experience.
YI CHEN LI hails from Caotun in Nantou and now calls Tainan home. Raised in a rural farming village, she cherishes the honest purity of the land. Through her university years and early career in architecture, she has delved into modern design to rediscover traditional roots, delighting in the ways craft shapes cultural heritage and finding ways to weave it into contemporary life. A lover of travel and painting, Li nurtures both her daily rhythms and emotions—and treasures the warmth of handmade work.
Since earning her master’s in Architectural History and Theory from National Cheng Kung University in 2012, she has remained in Tainan as an architectural designer at Harmony Environmental Architecture Design, specialising in residential projects. That same year, driven by her passion for craft, she launched her personal brand YICHENHANDIWORK, centring on hand-carved rubber stamps and sharing her creations at markets and invited exhibitions.
In 2019, Li began serving as a “seed teacher” for the Ministry of Education’s southern-region Aesthetic Education program, bringing her “Texture Gathering” workshops into junior high and elementary schools. Since June 2022, she has also led the cultural-lifestyle arm of her firm—ArtDeCorner in Tainan—curating creative experiences that bridge architecture, craft, and daily life.
LUKE M WALKER is a London-based Artist whose work focuses on the local environment and documenting the changing city around him through painting, interventions and collaborative projects. This involves walking expeditions in the immediate locality, but also taking him further afield on specific walks where he collects data and material from which he constructs his paintings. He also leads artist walks around London, demonstrating how the city and a walking practice influence his work.
