itinerant space

Independent art publishing practice in contemporary China is engaged in a delayed and silent covert resistance, in contrast to Western world countries, where radical activism is adequately legitimised. Western development models and theoretical frameworks thus cannot be directly applied when analysing the cultural products of an environment that is different from pervasive Western perceptions. When observing the practice of independent art publishing in China, the legal ambiguity of individual publishing greatly contributes to the nomadic nature of the practice and the obscurity of its expression. Signals of opposition and contradiction are often transmitted through symbols.

My visual language consists of figurative manifestos and abstract graphic figures based on temporary sites empathetic to sensitive personal narratives under the East Asian cultural milieu. Communicative power resides in the interpretation and translation. These temporary sites include workshops at art book fairs, art classes at summer camps for high school students, and regularly updated posters at alternative bookstores. In temporary venues, provisional alternative imagined communities are formed where the audience and the designer work together to determine the form and content of the visual language. This kind of participatory research brings a co-creative nature to my works as a practice of narrative research, where I am documenting the unique practice of book form by people closely involved in the practice and dissemination of independent art publishing in China. The existence of social media has made it possible for temporary communities to continue in the virtual space while disappearing in the real world.