Editors’ Picks from BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair

Booked: Hong Kong Art Book Fair returned to Tai Kwun Contemporary for its second edition on January 16, amid much enthusiasm from fans of art books, zines, and independent publishing. With more than 80 local and international exhibitors participating over the four-day event, Booked offers a diverse range of art-related materials, from books to albums, prints, magazines, and catalogues, as well as book arts, stationaries, and memorabilia, and limited-edition artist books. Running in parallel with the fair is a curated program of talks and workshops, and a special project in 2020, dubbed “Overbooked,” a group exhibition of nine international artists whose practice stems from non-verbal concepts of language such as visual poetry, including British artist Aleksandra Mir who on opening night, performed Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head—collectively drawing a large-scale black and white work on paper in Sharpie with her audience. Members of the ArtAsiaPacific team share some of their highlights and discoveries. THE EDITORS

I barely made it to a third of the tables at Booked on opening night but even while tending to the ArtAsiaPacific booth, items were coming our way. Artist Charlene Man produced the fair merchandise, being sold in shopping carts pushed around the aisles by the Tai Kwun Contemporary staff. I bought a pair of blue socks and a pin of a reclining figure with a book chained to their ankle (HKD 150, USD 19 for both). Man has her own table for her Lazy Press, selling zines, artist books, and more pins. Adjacent is Inpatient Press, run by Hong Kong’s Lamma Island residency Speculative Place, which created Salty Wet, a ’zine featuring a cover from a Hong Kong softcore porn magazine, showing the 1989 student demonstrations in Beijing (HKD 100, USD 13). Guangzhou’s Vitamin Creative is displaying a comically smutty, limited-edition Japanese calendar by artist Ming Wong. A project called The Scrap is distributing a daily envelope of images by South Korean artists trying to build networks of solidarity with people in Hong Kong. Another new discovery for me was Hex Editions, an ongoing series of humorously deadpan, short-run pocket books by artist Flavio Trevisan; each identical in format and dedicated to a single concept of collected images, such as Artificial Mountains (number 012) or Men with Models (019), while the ones titled TRANSITION resemble flip books, such as Fade to Black (017).  HG MASTERS

Aside from vintage Soviet photography magazines, the booth of the Moscow-based collective Russian Independent SelfPublished offers a stellar selection of books—many with a photographic slant—by artists working in the post-Soviet space. The publisher’s co-founder Elena Kholkina finds parallels between contemporary and vintage photographs in her book Did We Ever Meet? (2013), while Belarusian artist Anna Bundeleva’s Visible Mother (2019) imbues the hidden women in Victorian baby portraits with plural identities through sliding strips of appropriated faces, including of Kate Moss and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (1665). Across the hall is Singapore Art Book Fair’s booth, where Issue 1 of COCKEYE (2018) caught my eye with its found, “anonymously-photoshopped” cover image of a laundromat called Wong Kar Wash (tagline: “In the mood for Clean!”). Gems include editor Vicki Yang’s droll stickman-comic review of Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s documentary Railway Sleepers (2016), video artist Toh Hun Ping’s Spot the Difference puzzle based on a still from Malay period drama Hang Tuah (1956), and makeup artist Jeffrey Linus Lee’s diagrams of beauty looks for stock movie characters such as “Office Lady (OL) Missing Her Youth.” OPHELIA LAI

Amid the ongoing socio-political movement in Hong Kong, Booked this year has a heavy focus on protests, showcasing many zines and photography books documenting the spectacle of the current unrest. Some approached it through historical lenses. Local photographer Lau Chi-Chung’s project Double Gaze (2012) features his “photo of photo,” recording abandoned homes, schools, and stores. Reflecting on the domestic tradition of hanging portraits on walls, Lau’s protagonists—a young queen Elizabeth II, chairman Mao Zedong, and anonymous divorced couples—stare back uncannily within these eerie environments. Similar sentiments for the past can be found in Tiffany Sia’s eye-catching anti-travelogue essay Salty Wet (2019)—from the Cantonese word for “perverse”—shown by New-York based Inpatient Press. The zine is printed with the cover of the 46th issue of local pornography magazine Lung Fu Pao which, featuring a photo of the Tiananmen Square protests below a half-naked female porn star, was sold in 1989 in solidarity with the Beijing students. Sia’s zine rediscovers the essence of Hong Kong within films and pornography, with quotes from film and cultural critics discussing Hong Kong’s postcolonial state and future. PAMELA WONG

Vanishing Point: How to Disappear in America Without a Trace (2006), a pocket sized book by Susanne Bürner was the first thing that I saw at the booth of New-York based Printed Matter. A manual detailing how to disappear in American society, the book outlines certain circumstances under which one is not recommended to flee. Throughout the journey, Bürner assists the reader in the formation of a new identity. I found this a captivating concept, given the surveillance state of our society today. Lisa Mouchet’s handmade illustration book chronicling her solo trip in Québec, Panorama (2019), is also at the booth. Attractively printed with 6 colors risograph, the illustrations, sketches, and photographs portraying scenery and architecture perfectly complement one another. Zine Coop, a Hong Kong indie publishing artist collective, presents Burning IXXUES, a collection of around a hundred zines about global protests. The first issue, Decode 1: Occupy (May, 2015), was published in Taiwan. Decode provides an overview of the international socio-political movement Occupy, including those in Egypt, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and Indonesia, over 260 colored pages containing stunning image spreads. After discussing the movement’s historical background and its happenings in neighbouring regions, it highlights the movement’s progression in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2015, as well as foreshadowing future protests. TIFFANY TAM