Chaos and romance, resonance and collision. Wing Shya, the renowned Hong Kong photographer and designer—who has collaborated extensively with filmmaker Wong Kar-wai—and Inoue Tsuguya, a leading Japanese art director and graphic designer—celebrated for his work with Comme des Garçons as well as his own design house BEANS—engage in conversation about their new published book CHAOS.

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This Tai Kwun Conversation is a crossover event with BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair.

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With monthly participatory sessions around the subject of photography, Phoboko presents their 19th session, exploring the definition, functions and possible use of photobooks from historical and technological perspectives—along with questions about the future of photobooks in relation to changes in photo-imaging technology.

Part 1: Photobook appreciation—definitions of photobooks will be shared alongside a discussion on photobooks and what makes them impactful. Participants are asked to bring one photobook for this section.

Part 2: Marty Miller, a co-organiser of Phoboko, presents on using experimental photobooks, including his own and others as examples, in order to articulate points to discuss their communicative potential.

Part 3: Given enough time, participants will break into small groups to articulate what a photobook means to them through the experiences they provoke. Either way, the ensuing discussion will build on the other sections, and be used as a way to promote sharing with the larger group before the workshop ends.

Phoboko
Phoboko is a platform for bringing people together through photobooks and the topics they contain. Phoboko hosts monthly meetings and uses photobooks as a tool to talk about issues related to photography, to question new photographic work, and to openly share ideas via participatory methods. Phoboko’s emerging community interrogates photography as a medium, promotes the vision of local Hong Kong artists, and does so while in dialogue with other photographers in the Asia-Pacific region. IG: @phoboko

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This event celebrates the release of Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts, edited by Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam. This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth. This is an on-site and online event with the editors, and features readings from contributors Patty Chang, Hera Chan, and John Tain. 

Co-presented by Asia Art Archive and Tai Kwun Contemporary

Christopher K. Ho is an artist, educator, and Executive Director of Asia Art Archive.
Daisy Nam is the curator at Ballroom Marfa, a contemporary art space located in Far West Texas.
Hera Chan is a cultural worker whose practice is civic, informed by political praxis and structured by complicity with her peers.
Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects and impacted subjectivities.
John Tain is Head of Research at Asia Art Archive.

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This workshop aims to teach participants how to make a small 6 to 8 page illustrated concertina-style book. Participants will translate their ideas into illustrations for their books using an intaglio printmaking technique, drypoint, after which participants will then use their prints to be constructed and assembled into a concertina book.

Register here

This workshop is also offered at 3:30–6:30 pm on Sunday, 19 Dec 2021

“Why don’t we make a book about listening with a pencil?”

“Why don’t we make a book accessible to all?”

“Why don’t we make a book about expressing sound and listening using our hands?”

Now all these “why don’t we” questions have become a part of soundpocket’s “pocket book of sound” series. Together with Wayne Choi and Joseph Yiu, Hsu Wai-lun and So Lai-ping, and So Wai-lam, we share our observations and thoughts about how we perceive sounds and how we imagine others perceiving sounds, in the form of experiential books. “Shape with Things” invites everyone to observe their unconscious habits while listening; “dok dat dap dap” experiments with the possibility of recalling people’s listening experiences in the rain using different senses; and “Hands Up: sound & listening” introduces us to a language that is so close to us, yet we are not usually discussed.

In this upcoming DIALOGUE event, our moderator Beatrix Pang has a conversation with Wayne Choi and Joseph Yiu, Hsu Wai-lun and So Lai-ping, and So Wai-lam about these new publications in the “pocket book of sound” series. Join us at this sharing session and experience the books for yourself!

Presented by soundpocket

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The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of artists’ books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers and a community of creative practitioners.

DAAP is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. With an emphasis on inclusivity from the start, we aim to privilege anecdotal histories and multiple perspectives alongside factual data, whilst our wiki style approach means that users can upload and describe their own materials, choose how to describe themselves in relation to these materials, and select appropriate sharing permissions at the time of upload.

In the talk we will introduce the key principles of the archive, and demonstrate how to catalogue a publication in the DAAP.

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"It is by now difficult to substantiate any single definition of a book as made by an artist,” the British artist Simon Cutts has said. In recent years, the art world internationally has paid greater and greater attention to “book arts”, while art book fairs have mushroomed throughout the world. Yet not all visitors or readers fully understand what “book arts” is. If the value of “books” in the field of art is to be discussed, certain aesthetic terms in “book arts” ought to be elucidated: how are “book arts”, “artist books”, “book binding”, “book design” different? This talk explores these terms while sharing mesmerising examples of book arts from around the world.

Presented by Hei Shing

This lecture performance uses a tangled, multivocal combination of archival historical records, fictive responses, speculative texts, autoethnographic and interviewee accounts of lived mixed race experience in Hong Kong, as well as found photographs and wearables. It unsettles the origins and ongoing attitudes towards mixed race identity in Hong Kong, from stigma to fetishization, and how assumptions along that continuum are shaped by discredited but still prevalent racial hierarchical norms. In the bodily lived experience of mixed race, binary oppositions make no sense, there can be no fault line of ‘them’ and ‘us’ within the body. Not half but both.

Kay Mei Ling Beadman is an artist, researcher and co-founder of Hidden Space, an independent artist-run space in Hong Kong. She uses her own Chinese and English mixed heritage as an autoethnographic springboard to explore aspects of complex dual identity formation, drawing on embodied aspects of lived experience amid socio-politically and culturally constructed assumptions. Her practice is multidisciplinary and includes installation, video, painting, text and performance. Beadman was born in England, zigzagged between Hong Kong and the UK growing up, but has lived and worked permanently in Hong Kong since 1999. She has a BFA from the University of Reading, UK, an MFA from RMIT University, Australia, and is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

In this talk, Floating Projects founder Linda Lai, along with fellow member Winsome Wong, will share about the Manifesto series published by the team, in relation to the connections between books and video art. Throughout the talk, the speakers will discuss Floating Projects’ published manifesto series, including the concept for the open call that led to the newly published Manifesto 2, and its progression from the inaugural edition. The team members will also share ways of approaching the book by readers, along with some thoughts from conversations with different filmmakers and considering future plans for the Manifesto series and video zines.

The Manifesto series on videography, launched in 2016, is a project initiated by research-based interdisciplinary artist, Dr. Linda Chiu-han Lai, to encourage the repurposing of videography in a time when image-making tools are ubiquitous: Videography highlights “writing” with moving images; and writing asserts the proactive insertion of our subjectivities into our contemporary society of discipline and control. As such, we have gathered self-directed, diligent videographers to enter a series of rigorous dialogues and to become a theorist of their own practice. , a 365-page bilingual book, includes 49 local and overseas videographers’ manifestos, and a total of 67 video works.

This conversation grows out of Art and Its Worlds: Exhibitions, Institutions, and Art Becoming Public, the latest volume in Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series, co-published by Asia Art Archive. The discussion between artist Choi Yan Chi, curator Janet Fong, and AAA Head of Research John Tain will focus on Object-Act-Ivities (1989), an installation and performance co-organised by Leung Ping Kwan, Choi Yan Chi, and Yau Ching, exploring the collaborative nature of the project. It will be preceded by a screening of a video made on the occasion of the performance, now in AAA’s collection.

Co-presented by Asia Art Archive and Tai Kwun Contemporary

Choi Yan Chi is a visual artist who has been active since the 1980s and a co-founder of 1a Space, one of oldest independent, non-profit art organisations in Hong Kong.  She is often credited with helping introduce installation art to the region, and currently has a work on view at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.  

Janet Fong Man Yee is Research Assistant Professor at Academy of Visual Arts (AVA), Hong Kong Baptist University.  She has curated numerous exhibitions across Asia, one of which, New Horizons: Ways of Seeing Hong Kong Art in the 80s and 90s, is currently on view at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. 

John Tain is Head of Research at Asia Art Archive, and is a series editor for Afterall Exhibition Histories. 

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This workshop aims to teach participants how to make a small 6 to 8 page illustrated concertina-style book. Participants will translate their ideas into illustrations for their books using an intaglio printmaking technique, drypoint, after which participants will then use their prints to be constructed and assembled into a concertina book.

Register here

In this conversation, artist Jun Yang and curator Ingrid Pui Yee Chu discuss the role of publishing in his multidisciplinary practice, including for Syndromes and Fictions, a special project of BOOKED:. Yang’s approach to art in print distinguishes itself both in form and concept, such as in its more playful aspects. This includes how Yang, as an individual, mines the ways in which published materials can be reproduced in multiple and dispersed in order to experiment with the “artist as author”, such as through word play to indicate interchangeable identities, or by collaborating with others. The frequent inclusion of printed matter within Yang’s larger practice, which ranges from film to installation, also testifies to artists’ self-representation through print—all while cultivating the experience of books as a form of travel, being a format that enables storytelling, both in terms of the tales we tell others, and what this tells about ourselves.

Courtesy of the artist and the shop

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