What can you do to build, preserve, or escape your own “sense of self”? What parts are grounded in fact, and what others are serviced by fiction? How does this change through time, over distance, and from unrecognisable to all-too-familiar surroundings?

The Chinese-Austrian artist Jun Yang, who lives and works in Vienna, Taipei, and Yokohama, and for whom art in print plays an integral role in his practice, creates Syndromes and Fictions for BOOKED:. The installation, intermixing urban and domestic environments, breeds familiarity: in the sky-blue, gridded wallpaper partially covering two walls, in stone-clad and print-covered pedestals in the same tile pattern displaying Yang’s books, and in being used for bench seating.

Further animating this setting are two separate, if symbiotic moving image works: Paris Syndrome (2007–2008) sees a young couple visiting sites modelled after international landmarks, presumably to “travel the world” without ever leaving home. Seoul Fiction (2010) follows another elderly couple, whose family visit brings them on a surreal journey to the inner city—and beyond.

Within this setting is the inclusion of Yang’s artist books, giving context to the frequent use of printed matter as part of his creative output, and the expanded role of publishing in contemporary art.

Teeth Marks includes international artists using posters as a medium of artistic expression. The title refers to paper being described as having “tooth” owing to its rough texture, as well as the myriad ways in which the print surface is treated by artists in creating their work—often in multiple and as limited editions. Here, artists use posters to explore how publishing can serve as a linguistic tool, promotional vehicle, or through conceptual or critical points of view, reconsider the potential of “art in print” in order to imagine its future.

Teeth Marks includes works by Joseph Beuys, Pavel Büchler, Cao Fei, Luke Casey, David Horvitz, Miranda July, Martin Kippenberger, Forrest Lau, Dave Muller, Onion Peterman, Slavs and Tatars, Jasper Sebastian Stürup, Derek Sullivan, Ron Terada, and more, including current BOOKED: exhibitors’s posters and related ephemera.

Glossed Over presents 25 artist-led magazines that play with the format of glossy fashion magazines, pushing and parodying the capitalistic aesthetic of pop culture and product branding and instead filling the pages with artist commissions, images and texts.

Born in the Mainland and having moved to Hong Kong as a child, the artist Tang Kwong San has been exploring identity, family relations, and boundaries in his works, including tracing his own family history and researching the history of migration in Hong Kong over the decades.

Recalling how his ailing mother shared her failure and near-death experience swimming across to Hong Kong, the artist began to study the wave of refugees from the 1950s onwards; he also read up on diasporas. When the "Touch Base Policy" was established in the 1970s, migrating surreptitiously by water into Hong Kong served as a beacon of hope for certain Mainland youths—the artist’s mother being one of them. After his mother’s death, Tang returned to his mother's home in the Mainland, where he found a stash of family photos and documents about her arrival in Hong Kong, evoking dim memories of his mother in his childhood.

Tung Ping Chau's proximity to the Mainland coast rendered it an important point en route to Hong Kong. In a series of three video installations titled Diaspora III, Salt and Dia IV, the artist went to Tung Ping Chau to record how books in a glass box were battered by the sea water and waves connected to the mainland, as well as the traces left by books when they dry up. While recalling his mother's past experiences, he also ponders the roots of contemporary social dispersion and the relationship between humans and land.