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.
The highlight of the event is “Sounds Like Print”, co-curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and Edward Sanderson, and co-organised with Daniel Szehin Ho. The project explores how the visible and the audible overlap: on the one hand, the ways in which sound and music 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.
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.
“Sounds Like Print” will also feature 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.
There will also be 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”.
Tickets will be available on KLOOK from April 3, priced at HK$40 for adults and HK$30 for concession.
Header image credits: Tai Kwun
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