In 1999, the artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought a manga character from “K” works, a Japanese firm that develops Manga figures. Huyghe and Parreno decided to ‘free the image from the animation market’, named ‘her’ Annlee, made their own initial works and invited other artists to use Annlee for new art projects, free of charge. Annlee was given a voice, history and an identity and she popped up in animation videos, paintings, objects, installations, posters and a magazine, soundworks and a book.

I saw parts of their Annlee project in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven some years ago. In the end 28 “Annlee works” were produced by 18 different artists. The project was finalized in 2002 with the artists definitively killing her off and liberating her from the realm of representation -as they described it- by signing over the copyrights of the image to Annlee herself. But is this really the end? Is Annlee dead, truly free, or both?

A decade after the Annlee project came to an end, artists are invited to respond to the Annlee project ‘unofficially’ hoping to open up the character to new art pieces. As Philippe Parreno suggested: “the project doesn’t stop in the absence of Annlee, it can always produce more authors.” We look forward to your input, ideas and brand new artworks! Art can be uploaded freely onto a blog provided by NIMK dedicated to this ‘Annlee Blog project’.

• Annlee Blog WordPress admin page
• Annlee Project page
• Netherlands Media Art Institute(NIMK)