BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair 2023

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Tai Kwun Contemporary’s BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair 2023 is returning for its fifth edition, with local, regional, and international exhibitors joining in person. Extending across the gallery spaces of JC Contemporary and F Hall in Tai Kwun from 28 April to 1 May 2023, this latest edition also launches “Sounds Like Print”, a project that explores the intersection of “sound” and “print”.

For the first time since 2020, BOOKED: is welcoming exhibitors from outside the city physically back in Hong Kong, including Printed Matter (New York), Nieves (Zurich), onestar press / Three Star Books (Paris), Self Publish Be Happy (London), Afterall (London), Jakarta Art Book Fair (Jakarta), aBC (Beijing/Shanghai), Jiazazhi (Ningbo/Shanghai), and more. Additionally, Display Distribute and Reading Room will respectively bring along a special selection of books from lumbung kios and lumbung publishers, previously featured in Documenta 15. This inspiring range of artists and exhibitors reasserts BOOKED: as a major regional art book fair.

Venturing into new horizons, BOOKED: 2023 includes the project “Sounds Like Print” (28 April – November 2023), co-curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and Edward Sanderson, and co-organised with Daniel Szehin Ho. “Sounds Like Print” explores how the visible and the audible overlap: on the one hand, the ways in which sound and music—what we hear and listen to—are recorded in print, in the packaging around sound and music, as well as magazines, zines, and flyers, and on the other, how printed matter can trigger or generate sounds. Created in affordable, multiple copies for distribution and circulation, music/sound recordings as well as printed matter have remarkable similarities to one another, particularly in opposition to the classical notion of “art” considered as valuable and unique. There is thus an accessible, indie or self-made spirit here.

The project launches with a special display of sound art and experimental music primarily from the Mainland, on loan from the archive of Hong Kong-based curator and scholar Dr. Edward Sanderson, alongside several “Notations” exploring associated themes. Other artworks by Samson Young (Hong Kong), Dave Muller (Los Angeles) and mmmmor studio (Düsseldorf/Hong Kong) are set among the Artists’ Book Library. During BOOKED: 2023, “Sounds Like Print” features London-based Li Yilei’s new performance trilogy, which explores the relationship between printed matter and sound as a way to imprint oneself in a public space, while a durational piano performance spearheaded by Samson Young on the last day, as part of his larger Furniture Music series, combines repurposed furniture with books and recorded sound as a way to visually represent sound, as well as its silences.

Featuring more than 80 artists, publishers, organisations, and booksellers, BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair also includes special displays by the Hong Kong photographer Kurt Tong, the Swiss independent publishing house Nieves, and the high-end French publisher onestar press / Three Star Books, along with a wide range of public programming such as talks, workshops, and performances. Of note is an on-site performance by BASE (Florence Lam and Pang Jing), who will walk through the fair and interact with books in a variety of acrobatic ways, generating new definitions of female “bodily knowledge”.

BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair underscores Tai Kwun Contemporary’s dedication to providing a platform for creative practitioners and publishers who are invested in books as a medium of artistic and intellectual expression while providing an opportunity for public audiences to enjoy and engage with these materials as art, and as an important resource for learning and research.