This morning, I shipped off three editions to a delivery service near Narita airport. The work from all the artists participating will be inventoried and shipped to New York City by the end of the week. With work shipped off, I can finally take a breath after two months of intense studio work.
Since late last summer, my studio practice has been primarily focused on making artist’s books and it seems like a good time to reflect on the process of thinking and making artist’s books. This is bound to be a length post, so I plan to break it up into digestable chunks for readers of this blog. First off, here are the three editions that I sent off for the New York Japanese Young Artists’ Book Fair.
For Printed Matter and Kinokuniya Bookstore, I am going to be exhibiting two editions.
“21 Days of Memory Walks” (2015), Edition of 21, each with a unique cover, and 2 artist’s proofs.
Ink, Paper, Acrylic, Plastic, and Eggshells
21 Days of Memory Walks compiles three weeks of Memory Walk drawings from January 2015. The inspiration for this project comes from my studio practice focused on the everyday and my research work as a neuroscientist studying the mechanisms of learning and memory. Each eggshell consists of all the walks that I take on one day. At the time of each walk, I record the time and departure point. I use this information to create mental maps of my walks by remembering, reimagining, and drawing each walk, usually the next day. All the drawings are made within a few days of the walk. I use symbols to indicate landmarks such as stairs, elevators, or doors. The different colors indicate when I have used a mode of transportation other than walking to reach a destination, such as buses, trains or automobiles.
“Shimokitazawa Interstices” (2015), Edition of 10 and 2 artist’s proofs.
Ink, Paper, and Acetate
Alleyways are often overlooked in our daily lives. Tokyo’s alleyways are particular appealing to me for two reasons. They are very narrow so it feels as if you are peering into a secret passageway and what one finds in these in-between spaces is a peek into the lives of Tokyo’s inhabitants. In my studio practice, I create composite digital photographs from a particular location by using photo editing software. The layering of photographs transforms these overlooked spaces into something that invites closer examination. Shimokitazawa Interstices gives the reader a chance to create his/her own composite photographs. Each image comes from an alleyway in the Shimokitazawa neighborhood of Tokyo. You can interchange images and create your own composite images. The size of this book is smartphone compatible so you can take a photo of the white back cover or use a flashlight app to backlight your composite photographs of Shimokitazawa.
For St. Mark’s Bookshop, I will be exhibiting the following edition.
“The Longest Road From Work” (2015), Edition of 4 and 1 artist’s proof
Ink, Acetate, Monofilament, and Acrylic Sheet
The Longest Road From Walk compiles a series of photographs that I took on a stretch of road that is the start of my commute home from work. It is a 200 meter stretch of road that I find to be the most tedious part of my walk. There is a busy road on one side and a concrete wall on the other side. I began taking photographs every 5 – 10 meters on my walks home to break up the monotony. Using my work with composite photographs as a jumping off point, I play on the idea of composite photographs, perspective, and arrival.
I am happy with the three editions that I am sending to New York. Of the three editions, only “The Longest Road From Work” was exhibited at the Tokyo edition of the Young Artists’ Book Fair. I made a similar book that was exhibited at Kinokuniya, “The Long Road to the Supermarket”, however, I think the materials for that book were not the ideal choices for the work. However, I did really enjoy the circular format of “The Long Road to the Supermarket” and look forward to revisiting that idea.
With the Interstices artist books from the Tokyo edition, I began to see things I wanted to improve when I was sitting with the work during my first weekend at Kinokuniya. I realized that while the accordion fold concept was interesting as a structure of the Interstices photographs, it was not an ideal match for the concept of the Interstices artist books. The folding of the books from the Tokyo Art Book Fair was not intuitive and did not really work in terms of getting the reader to play with varying the order of the images. As it turns out the “Interstices and Vending Machines (2015 version) while better produced, it still lacked a reader friendly approach to making one’s own composite images. The regular accordion fold of the 2015 version also made it even more rigid since there was only one way to fold and close the book. In both cases, viewing the “composite” images was really challenging. I found most people either holding the work up a light or window. In both cases, the “composite” images were often backgrounded by the light source or whatever was in the window.
With the “Interstices and Bicycles” artist book, I was not really happy with the perfect binding. It seemed flimsy in some cases. I started to wonder if it was a technique that I could carry forward. As it turns out the process of perfect binding needed some fine tuning. One of the things that I noticed while working on the perfect binding for New York editions was that clipping the ends of the books after making sure the paper and cover was flush was not also enough, there was often a bulge in the middle of the spine. With “21 Days of Memory Walks”, the small size of the book as well as the plastic front and back cover minimized or eliminated the bulge in the middle of the spine. With the “Shimokitazawa Interstices”, the problem was much more obvious as the first attempt to perfect bind the book was a disaster as the PVA leaked into the pages of the book in the middle so that when the book was opened completed, it would tug at the tracing paper window and cause the tracing paper to rip. This is where I revisited my doubts about perfect binding, but I managed to circumvent this problem with my container of white rice.
While not the ideal to create even pressure along the spine of a book, it did the trick. It provided enough pressure to allow for the PVA to harden along the spine of the book without seeping in between the pages. As was point out by a fellow artist as well as most bookbinding books, I will have to invest in a couple vices and a long thin wood board to make the process more consistent and perhaps even cleaner.
Close to 1200 words, I think this is a good stopping point for tonight. Part 2, tomorrow.
For the publication, the interest is in the public domain so it less about the composite photographs and more about how these spaces function for me as well as the population at large. With that idea, the focus is more on the individual photographs of the interstices and thinking about how they are used and what exists in those spaces. Here are a couple singular photographs.
Arthur J Huang 