PREFACE
Artists and projects: Zhang Peili, Jasphy Zheng, Ding Yi, Li Mu, Liu Ding, New Measurement Group, Li Shuang, Cheng Xinhao, Zheng Guogu, Yang Yuanyuan, Qiang Weikang, Huang Yongping, Liu Chuang, Tao Aimin, Feng Huo Magazine, 45 degrees as a Reason, November 24th as a Reason, Black Cover Book, White Cover Book, Grey Cover Book, The Wildlife project, Birdhead, Hu Jianping, Geng Jianyi, Xia Chengwei, PDF magazine.

This exhibition is the outcome of a long-term research project and a curatorial interest in articulating a relationship between books, storytelling, and artistic practices in China. It aims to underline historical and current understandings of the book as a medium, while also opening space for the book’s plural materialities, its tactile qualities, and different forms of storytelling. The exhibition offers insights into the historical trajectories of artists whose relationships to books are often complex and entangled with questions of authorship and readership—specifically, who writes books and for whom, and what kinds of literacies we need to grasp these ideas and their context.

Books represent knowledge and symbolize authority through their content and distribution. Conversely, writing—understood here in an expanded sense as leaving a trace intended to communicate with others—serves as a way to participate in struggle and disseminate knowledge as a form of worldmaking.

This exhibition research explores the role of the book in the context of China from 1979 until the present day, positioning 1979 as an important symbolic point of Cultural Fever, with the beginning of DuShu publishing and its leading article “No Forbidden Zone in Reading”. This moment greatly influenced Chinese intellectuals and marked the beginning of a period of translating Western thought, alongside a publishing fever during the 1980s that influenced many artists and their ways of thinking.

Over the last thirty years in China, the book has played various roles, with artists using different strategies to address their relationship to this specific medium. For artists, books open different kinds of space towards storytelling. Many artists intentionally choose the book as a way of distancing themselves from the exhibition as the sole mode of artistic presentation. In books, artists recognize the potential of this specific medium of expression to enable not only the act of viewing the work, but also reading the work, and more importantly, allowing readers to touch the work. Today, artists’ books are important artistic tools, not only for knowledge transmission and reading, but also as important conceptual vehicles for artists’ thought. Allowing for touching, viewing, and physically engaging, artists’ books offer tactile experiences and sensorial pleasures that other art objects cannot provide.

For some, artists’ books are a way of democratizing art as many people can own these works and have access to them. At the same time, many artistic projects featured in this exhibition are entangled with decolonial and feminist perspectives and methodologies, using books as tools for challenging dominant narratives. This research explores different positions and relationships: between books and artistic practice; knowledge transmission and community formation through decentralized dissemination of ideas; storytelling by those on the margins; and forms of literacy that challenge human-centric worldviews, inviting us to be more attentive to our interdependence with more-than-human worlds.

Each book makes its own contribution to struggle. Thus, this exhibition doesn’t have a unique title in Chinese. Instead, it has as many titles as there are artists’ books, each inviting you to engage with them. The exhibition provides a comprehensive presentation of artistic practices that repeatedly return to the book as both a medium of expression and a form of dissemination.

As our reading and social habits evolve, artists’ books continue to offer us physical and tactile interactions that digital screens cannot provide. I propose we understand the character Du (to read) not merely as a way of reading a script, but as a way of embodying struggle and as an invitation to leave a physical trace. Scholar Ian Hunter notes that reading is somewhere between breathing and judging. Beathing is an automatic and natural activity most of the time, while judging—as in courts or beauty contests—is a highly social activity so charged with social and cultural meaning that there is nothing natural about it. Therefore, here I propose to recall Stephen Muecke’s reminder to understand reading as a form of cultural and historical determination, rather than as a matter of individual difference.