BOOKED: 香港藝術書展 Hong Kong Art Book Fair Tai Kwun Contemporary 大館當代美術館

Kurt Tong: Dear Franklin

By chance, Hong Kong-based artist Kurt Tong came into possession of a trunk filled with documents, letters, photographs, notes and books belonging to a stranger, a man called Franklin Lung. Intrigued by the life into which he had glimpsed, Tong began to research and piece together the story of Franklin Lung over several months.

In “Dear Franklin,” Tong takes the reader into this life. Through fragments and photographs and, crucially, letters, Lung’s story as a man who began life in a modest family and came to settle in Shanghai. As the book continues and the years change from the 1930s to the 1950s, Tong weaves historical narratives—about China, about the world, about the rise of fascism around the world, about the China diaspora—into Lung’s personal story. Over time, the photographs and notes and letters reveal not only a love story but the unfolding of China’s political and social history of the early 20th century.

The story was published as a book in 2022 but this is the first time the trunk will be shown alongside some of its content, artefacts and vintage photographs in public.

Nieves

Independent Swiss publishing house Nieves brings its longstanding focus on artist-made zines to Hong Kong with a presentation of hundreds of pocket-sized, image-based publications it has commissioned over the past 20 years. Nieves pioneered the concept of putting out artist’s zines as a publisher, instead of an artist publishing his or her own zines independently.

Founded in 2001 by publisher Benjamin Sommerhalder, Nieves is a publishing house based in Zürich that specialises in artist books and zines.

Sounds Like Print

Sounds Like Print centres around a vitrine in the Artists' Book Library introducing the project's main theme: the interplay of artists' sound recordings and how they physically appear in analogue forms. These include cassettes, CDs, and vinyl records, as well as printed matter like songbooks, fanzines, and posters—also known as “extra art” precisely for being produced in multiple and circulating widely.

The vitrine's content, primarily sourced from the archive of Dr Edward Sanderson, explores the sonic culture and experimental music scenes in Mainland China and Hong Kong through their design and packaging, alongside complementary Artists' Book Library selections.

Surrounding the vitrine are several tables and shelves providing thematic “Notations” – from the “do-it-yourself” ethos resounding among independent art and sound publishers, to many forms of translation used to re-examine locality within international music and sound art histories.

Over the course of this “time and tempo”-inspired project, evolving installations, performances, sharing sessions and talks will activate the display and all that it contains.

Sounds Like Print is curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and Dr Edward Sanderson, and co-organised with Daniel Szehin Ho.

mmmmor studio (Wai Lun Hsu & Lai Ping So): flo-o-o

flo-o-o uses six sound clips recorded in six water-centric locations in Hong Kong—harbours, reservoirs, and channels—as creative references. Through an exploratory, open-ended approach, auditory experiences are translated into unconventional visual and tactile representation. As such, the work aims to create equal ground among three sensory communities—the visually-impaired, the hearing-impaired, and everyone else—and reimagine how they can access auditory experiences, depending on their senses.

Dave Muller: Quick Picks (twenty-six)

Quick Picks (twenty-six) (2004/2023) includes the spines of twenty-six “long playing” records from Dave Muller's personal collection, reproduced as large vinyl stickers across multiple windows in the Artists' Book Library. Alphabetised from “Abba” to “ZZ Top”, the records appear like stacked books, though enlarged to reflect the artist's height to become a conceptual portrait through Muller's musical taste.

Samson Young: Furniture Music

Furniture Music comprises two new versions of Bookshelf Music (2015, revised 2017) and Coffee Table Music (2017) by Hong Kong artist Samson Young, who combines clusters of vintage furniture with the silences and gaps from recorded interviews and algorithmically-generated “songbooks” to explore how sound and print can intersect to generate singular and shared experiences.

Sounds Like Print Vitrine

Vitrine

Sound appears most commonly through recordings captured on CDs, cassettes, and vinyl records, which can be played back on the equipment included in the vitrine, and their cover designs are an important parallel to their sonic contents. The saw blade and sanding sheets show sound-producing objects as metaphors for various social and culture issues.

For example, a CD and exhibition pamphlet provide an entry point to the groundbreaking performances of Hong Kong's Xper.Xr and his band, The Orphic Orchestra, who incorporate noise and mayhem as tools to criticise the art and music systems. Also, Guangzhou's Yang Licai transforms a circular saw blade and sanding sheet to resemble a CD and vinyl record—but would have potentially catastrophic effects if played. Yang considers these discarded objects as stand-ins for people forgotten by society while revealing their overlooked potential.

Notations

• Unusual formats
• Sustained output
• Away from the Capital
• Improvisation in print
• DIY or Mainstream?
• Translation and Its (Dis)contents
• Scores, Songbooks and Soundtracks
• Hong Kong: A Legacy in Sound and Print