Introduction

Ann Lee in ANZEN ZONE is the third episode of No Ghost, Just a Shell, a collective project of Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, based on the Manga Comic character Ann Lee. In 1999 Parreno had purchased the copyright for this character from Kworks, the agency where Ann Lee had been created, for the price of 46 000 Yen - a real bargain, since the purchase price for a Manga character depends on its complexity, its skills and thus its ability to adapt to any given story and to become the hero of a Comic book. Ann Lee did not dispose of any special qualities, she was designed "to join any kind of story, but with no chance of surviving any of them." To purchase Ann Lee meant to save her from an industry which would have condemned her to death. 

In the episodes created by Parreno (Anywere Out of The World) and Huyghe (Two Minutes Out of Time) it was the question of identity and personal history which Ann Lee was primarily confronted with. While in Parreno's version Ann Lee, reponed into a semi-finished state, reported on the possibilities she could have been given in her life, Huyghe supplied her with a real biography. 

In Ann Lee in ANZEN ZONE it is exactly the lack of history which Gonzalez-Foerster makes the principal quality of the Manga character. Ann Lee makes a ghostlike appearance, and she speaks Japanese - a sign of a return to her own identity. She is accompanied by a lookalike, a "living translation" of herself, who presents herself as herald of an apocalyptic prophecy: „There will be no safety zone. You will disappear into your screen... I promise on the head of my clones and on our purple planet… They will invade your structures. They will separate you from your feelings. They will transform your emotions… There is nowhere to go. Absolutely nowhere in this completely lost universe. I speak with all my voice… As sure as my name is Ann Lee, you will all be sent to a place of no return." 

This double, emerging from herself and prophesying her own fate makes Ann Lee's existence a bewildering one between extinction and eternity. A "product freed from the market economy" (Parreno) becomes thus an intergalactic messenger who even approaches the more valuable heroic characters she once appeared with in the pages of a "Kworks" catalogue.