Brief analysis on my book making methods
July 4, 2023
Moving to Canada from my five-year study in photography and graphic design in the United States, I started my MDes study at Emily Carr University where I joined, as a student research assistant at Occasional Press. As a young Chinese diaspora, I have devoted my design research to self-publishing practice. At the beginning of 2023, I started to work on a publication project called Bittersweet, which was initiated as a series of Risograph printing experiments. It has become a soon-to-be-published Occasional Press title, as well as a part of my self-publishing practice and study.
Bittersweet is a photo book containing a visual essay which was thoughtfully sequenced with my photography works, and an autoethnographic article, Seeking My Own Language, reflecting my journey in questioning and constructing my identity through my diasporic living experience.
I was particularly interested in creative approaches that could combine or unify my two undergraduate majors, graphic design and photography. Book design was a field that I always wanted to learn more about as it was a perfect medium which allowed me to use my image-making skill with my design knowledge to convey a message, or to tell a story. Thanks to an eye-opening photo book class, instructed by Nelson Chan, I was amazed by how powerful the book as a medium is. I also learned how to build my photo archive and juxtapose two or more images to create narratives or questions from the photographic scenes of my photographs. These two creative methods have also become the primary approaches in my artist book-making practice. In Bittersweet, for example, the first three photographs—the hanging chair, the empty fishmonger and the seafood displayed on crushed ice—do not give a larger context of where the photo might be taken. As their stories behind the scenery are ambiguous, together they function as an “establishing shot” as they represent the daily and mundane scenery I’ve encountered in diasporic Chinese communities: from monochrome to colour images; from a slightly wider angle of the first two photos to a close-up shot.
Bittersweet is also a project in which I experimented with auto-ethnography as a method to create both the photo essay and the article. During the process of writing the article, I tried to gather as many personal materials as I could, such as images I took with my iPhone years ago, old photos saved in my Facebook account, emails I wrote to my homestay family, and many more. Those materials and documents helped me remember and reconstruct my living experience as I first settled in the US. Furthermore, as I went deeper into those memory fragments, I discovered a pattern of my political awakening through my interactions with others and along the way of making friends who share similar political viewpoints. Therefore the essay is titled Seeking My Own Language, revealing my journey to realizing my diasporic identity. Moreover, as I wrote the article, the auto-ethnographic approach also influences the curation of the photo essay. Before I had a clear picture of the entire book, I was only focusing on images that could reflect my diasporic experience such as the landscape in Chinatown (I lived in San Francisco Chinatown) because I thought they would translate my diasporic identity into images. However, informed by my auto-ethnographic writing, I created three slightly different scenarios divided by two, and the only two landscape-oriented images, correlating the three sections in the article. Together with the texts, they represent the journey of knowing my identity as an international student, learning my inherent cultural identity as a Cantonese Chinese, and constructing my political standpoint as a young Chinese émigré.
Prior to Bittersweet, my self-publishing practice started with the first photo zine intertwined. It is a zine that contains photographs I took at three different political rallies and marches, taking place in Hong Kong and San Francisco. By connecting the public space from the two cities, I used those images to contextualize and visualize my political standpoints as well as my struggling position between the two distinctive political cultures and environments. Although I focused on the tension between the two political cultures I was in, my anxiety and struggle towards my diasporic identity were present in the images and the photo sequence when I flipped the zine again a year after. I deliberately made my diasporic positionality even more visible in a later publication I did in the first year of my thesis research. Refuse is another zine consisting of a photo essay and a piece of text reflecting my thoughts in working on the zine. Coming from Sara Ahmed’s book What’s the Use, I “refuse” my identity given by the government-issued documents and tried to construct my identity through the action of refusing.
Capturing photographs, editing and curating them in a particular sequence, designing the publication and finally publishing the physical and tactile book, together they are the bone of my self-publishing practice. They also mark the concept of self-publishing. As the author, I was given the ability not only to come up with a piece of writing or a photo sequence but also to integrate the content into a physical book/zine and later publish it. As Ulises Carrión put this thinking between book and space in his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books, “…language can be experienced in an isolated moment and space—the page; or in a sequence of spaces and moments—the book.”(Carrión, 1975) In my practice, the language is the images; the page is what holds the visual poetry; and the book existing in the space where I devote myself to constructing my identity. Elaine W. Ho reminds me the “space” around a book has another meaning in terms of its distribution. By pointing out a simple yet difficult question “Who will read it?”, she mentions that this question reminds us as art publishers to think about the space around the book (Yong & Ku, 2023, p. 215). In my practice, I dedicate most of my work to discussions of my political and cultural identity. They are devices that can potentially activate discourses and spaces in which we can freely express ourselves. Therefore, hopefully, a collective identity can be defined by the young Chinese diaspora through the practice of self-publishing.
As an art book self-publisher and a Chinese émigré, I can’t help to imagine a space for others to exchange ideas through books about our diasporic experience and identity. Just like the example in the same essay by Ho where she uses “total football” to describe the practice of publishing and its logisticality, we are the defender, midfielder or attacker at the same time, and the football field is the space our books exist.