abC Team
总负责人 / 艺术总监：周玥
展会统筹：刘小门
项目管理：杨丹 / 许珂 / 陈家心
商务/媒体拓展：杨子艺
项目执行：郑云沧
公教活动：陈家心 / 胡沁迪
夢廠出版负责人：胡沁迪
网站设计：北 鸥
The 7th abC Art Book Fair · Beijing
2022.7.28-7.31
We are happy to announce that the 7th abC Art Book Fair · Beijing will be held at Beijing Quanyechang Cultural Arts Center from July 28th to July 31st, 2022. There will be 148 local publisher booths and 40 international publishers on a commissioned basis, bringing thousands of art publications this summer.
In 2022, abC Art Book Fair, with the theme of 「 Nomadic and Imagined 」, invites you to explore and imagine a free-roam adventure. The themed exhibition will occupy the first floor and an exhibition hall on the second floor with 3 Curated Selections, 7 Solo Projects/Works, 3 Special Projects, and 1 Sound Project.
The revelation of nomadism today prompts us to be alert to changes in ecology and climate; It represents the possibility of free and loose organization, flexible and effective action, decentralization, and breaking boundaries. Through "nomadism," we can find the "ligne de fuite" (Deleuze), find ways to coexist with differences in changing practices, understand the unknown chaos of the world, and let our free imagination reach far and wide.
Special Project
E05 Go Nomadic Together —— Rituals and Daily Life
Artists: Ariuntugs Tserenpil（Mongolia）,Gu Tao, Enkhbold Togmidshiirev（Mongolia）,Oyunerdene, NiNi Dongnier, Shinetana, LKhajav, Burenerdene (Quanbao), Urgen, Liu Chengrui, Zulan (Lv Jiajia), Timur Si-Qin（Germany）
Curators: Li Yuhang, Chyanga
Co-presenter：Rhizomic Space
Since Enlightenment thought, the once self-deprecating man gave up religious sanctity to embrace individual supremacy in the contemporary world. Rituals do not only connect horizontally, but also vertically with parallel sacred spaces. The connections made by rituals bring us back to the ritual itself, where the objects that appear in the ritual are not fetishistic embodiments, but rather connect to the sacred through the 'object'. To think about the sacredness of the ritual is also to rethink our relationship with objects and with our surroundings. The exhibition presents a connection not only to the supernatural sacred, but also to a sense of 'us' as sacredness, a symbiotic whole of human and divine and other species.
“Go Nomadic Together” is a call for effort against the loss of balance in present days. Based on the consensus the artists reached, a new community is formed and a “tribe”is born of the project. Rich in contemporary significance, it is made up of people from diversified cultural backgrounds who stick to their artistic uniqueness while keeping group consensus and collective memory and try to explore new possibilities through exchange of ideas. ”Go Nomadic Together” builds a field of experiment where people of different cultural backgrounds show empathy and seek what they have in common and a shared way out. It also shows how these artists reflect on our disrupted, lost world and meditate, feel, deconstruct and reconstruct by virtue of “nomadism”.
Gu Tao
Gu Tao
E12 Back to Nature
Artists: Zheng Bo、Claudeverett、Henk Wildschut
Curator: BE WATER JOURNAL
In the past century, the so-called "modern civilization" dominated by industrialization and urbanization has not only transformed the planet's surface on a large scale, but also profoundly affected the lives of all people.The wildfires in the Amazon rainforest, polar ice are melting as global warming, the emergence of climate refugees, and even the occurrence of outbreak epidemics have made us realize that "environmental issues" is the most urgent topic we need to pay attention to and discuss. Behind the environmental issues, we hope to explore the following questions in depth: What is our relationship with nature today?As Orientals, do we still believe the theory that “heaven and man are united as one”? What is nature? In this era, does nature need to be redefined?
In the 3rd issue “Nature” of the annual publication Be Water Journal, we try to sort out the changes in the natural world and the reasons behind them, and also try to re-establish our connection with nature, from various fields and clues, such as ecological art practice, natural design architecture and community construction, indigenous wisdom, field recording, traditional Chinese medicine and Oriental Taoist Culture etc.
In our exhibition, we would invite three interviewees from the 3rd issue of Be Water Journal, including Zheng Bo、Henk Wildschut、Claudeverett, to share their works about nature and ecology.
Zheng Bo，2015
on-site
Zheng Bo，2015
E15 Secret Balcony
Artists & Writers：Bai Lin, Bao Huiyi, David Szalay, Gu Xiang, Guo Yujie, Jan Carson, John Freeman, Julie Koh, Lan Lan, Liang Shuang, Lin Bai, Liu Shuwei, Lu Xiaoyu, Lu Ye, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, Shen Yi, Sun Xun, Wang Bang, Wu Ang, Wu Qi, Zhang Dinghao, Zhang Sai, Zong Cheng, Zoo, Yu Mo, and more
Curator: One-Way Street Journal
Who would not want to get the time back which has been encroached by the epidemic for three years? Driven by it, One-Way Street Journal has been collecting, publishing, and distributing a large number of diaries, poems, images, and sounds produced under the "state of exception". We have taken more time to compile the "secret" texts, weaving together the memories from common people to supplement or challenge the mainstream. The existence of the texts turned out to be necessary and important struggles, cries, and hesitation, in quarantine, lockdown, and control. When the going-out was limited, the going-indoors has been emerging as a new impetus, a space of resistance, and a desire for life, as the Spanish poet Lorca said, "¡Si muero, dejad el balcón abierto!" ("If I die, leave the balcony door open!")
Sound Project
Sound Project
E14 Warm Spell
KMRU (Kenya/Germany) , Aki Onda & Akio Suzuki (Japen/USA) , Tom White (UK) , Mariam Morshed (USA/UK) , Rie Nakajima (UK/Japen) , Lau Nau (Finland) , David Blamey (UK/France) , Hannah Dargavel-Leafe (UK)
Curator: David Blamey/ Continuous Tone
Warm Spell is an immersive sound installation conceived by London-based sound art label and online broadcast platform Continuous Tone. Visitors are invited to stop being busy for a moment; by pausing, resting your eyes, lying down or lingering, and reading with your ears.
Curated by one of the participating artists, David Blamey, the project is dedicated to the idea of travelling without moving. The sounds vibrating within the space will transport you beyond the immediate urban setting to the warmth of a succession of far away places.
Poster Design：Xu Ke
Curated Selection
E02 Multi-identities of the Plant
Learn how to get along with the plants, actively, passively and subtly. The selction of books from “Multi-identities of the Plant” will carry your body and mind to travel through the gaps between pages and leaves, between nature and city, between the practice of observing and acting… These green creatures may seem to be too static and passive in common sense, however, they may incarnate into a new unit for perceiving the world gradually. Leaves and branches, trees and flowers can begin to record the passage of time and the reincarnation of life; to reflect the signs of growth and decay, memory and forgetting, permanence and change.
E06 Dining-table Odyssey
We gather for food, and food accompanies us whenever we travel and migrate. We meet with dishes on plates and drink with the moon in wine glasses; colors and aromas are mixed with our memories and touch us through pots and pans.
In the "Dining-table Odyssey" series, food, like paper, can be seen as a medium, where cooking is also a creation, and readers are also diners. In the cumulative dining experience, our relationship with food is gradually woven into a web of mixed flavors... so we read, eat, and cherish every day with the everyday.
Solo Project
Solo Project
E03 Plant Whisper
Artists: Plants, Wanlin Jiang, Yunling Wu
Plant Whisper is a collaborative research project by plant adventurer Wanlin Jiang and digital artist Yunling Wu, focusing on the visualisation of plants dancing in the wind.
Collection of images and information -
Analysis of movement points -
Output of dynamic records -
Collation of static visualisations - Archiving -
Experimentation with derivative art forms.
Curiosity, observation, documentation and archiving of the natural aesthetics embedded in the plants themselves was our starting point, but in one interaction after another, our consideration of the relative relationship between humans and plants continued to evolve.
What do these beautiful poetic and mysterious symbols mean? Are we using human concepts to decode the language of plants in a way that we think is correct? There are still no answers yet. Rather than being the answerer, we offer the perspective of the questioner in the hope of evoking a little thought in the viewer.
Medium: Website, Archive, Book, Experimental Video, Installation
E04 Immediacy
Artist: Loh Xiang Yun
www.lohxiangyun.com
“The essence of time is captured in plant specimens that transcend the past, the present, and the future. ” Singapore-based artist and scientific botanical illustrator Loh Xiangyun will create a fabric work “Immediacy" for abC art book fair. In 2021, Luo Xiangyun completed her publication "Microscopic Images" together with Temporary Press. This book contains photos of plant specimens that Xiangyun used as a reference when drawing botanical illustrations, and also restores the process of her completing the illustrations. Over the years, Xiangyun has collected as many as 3,000 plant photos. She is going to select the plant photos, print them on fabrics of different materials, hand-sewn a 7-meter-long fabric work.
E07 The Last Spring Plowing
Artist: Pen Pa
Curator: Chakhang Art Festival
"With the city's expansion, all the farmland in our village was expropriated. Faced with the imminent loss of land, I feel that I have so much to say but don't know where to start. In the spring of 2016, my family and I plowed the land for the last time on the barley field that would soon be converted to other uses. And the whole process was recorded on video. At the end of the plowing, three of us brothers filled a bag of soil for each family as a souvenir and said goodbye to the land we had been farming for generations."
-- Artist Pen Pa
Pen Pa, a Tibetan, was born in 1974 in Dulong Deqing County, Lhasa, Tibet. He studied at Hefei Teachers' College in Anhui Province and Hebei Normal University. He graduated from the School of Art of Tibet University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2013. His works involve painting, video, performance, installation, collage, and other forms. He has held or participated in many art exhibitions globally.
The work "The Last Spring Plowing" is presented by the Chakhang Art Festival Through painting, installation, and video, the Tibetan artist Pen Pa commemorates the lost connection to the earth in the context of urban expansion.
E08 Anything That Flies
Artist: Ruben Lundgren
Many of the wonderful dishes presented in this album go far beyond the common art of plating. The food reliefs, radish sculptures and other eatable delights were created for professional food competitions or served as example wedding plates from the 1980s onwards. The temporarily appearance most likely won over it’s flavour, but who would care. Although chickens don’t fly nor bath much, they are well represented just like the cranes, ducks and the occasional sparrow. Yes, an exception was made for two lovely flying fish. Don’t forget to look at the side of the plates as well. Not only will you find some of the best baijiu but also, for the true photo-detective, a canned feast of tomato sauce and Flying Wheel luncheon meat.
Beijing-based photographer and curator Ruben Lundgren received his masters’ degree photography from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He made a name within the conceptual photography duo WassinkLundgren with award winning publications as Empty Bottles (2007) and Tokyo Tokyo (2010). He now works as a photojournalist for Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, and as an independent curator of Chinese photography.
E09 Vine Practices
Artist: Qindi Hu
The paths that cross the neighborhoods, the trails that pass through the woods in the hills, the vision weaving, the dough fermenting, the paper binding.
The looping curves connect the everyday life. Looking back, the connections between things become clear and concrete. Sometimes the thread is also left to roll, and the next place it randomly points may hide a new glass marble.
That's the hint about this tabletop display: it contains some trajectory of the making process. If you also like to whip egg whites and cream or write in fancy script, you can certainly start by making cookies and carving a woodcut. Just migrate between ingredients and materials in the kitchen or living room. Thank you, food, for bringing me satiety and anticipation.
E10 Fortune Desserts
Artist: Tofoodesign ( Yue LIU and Xijing XU)
Invented by the Japanese in the 19th century, fortune cookies have traveled overseas along the paths of immigrants and were carried forward by Chinese-Americans throughout the turbulent history. It is presented in the Chinese restaurant at the end of the meal as an alternative to dessert. This humble biscuit, not well known in the East Asian Chinese-speaking world, has gradually become the ambassador of Chinese food overseas. In Chinese restaurants in Italy, a large bowl is often placed at the entrance counter, from which customers can take a fortune cookie at the checkout. For Xijing and Yue, who grew up in mainland China and moved to Europe, it is a moment of re-encounter with the East Asian immigrants of a century ago, thousands of miles away from home.
On the map of food wandering, the two designers trace the history of human migration and movement between continents and oceans and the trajectory of their personal lives. At the end of the exhibition, they have embedded some dessert recipes from their cross-cultural life experiences into the fortune cookies as a 'post-exhibition dessert'. They hope these recipes will also find their way into your kitchens to achieve their cultural wandering and the taste wandering across the borders of the two designers.
E11 Dutch Landscape in Beijing
Artist: José Quintanar
"Dutch Landscape," a series of drawings by the Spanish artist, architect, and publisher José Quintanar, will go on a "nomadic" journey in the form of wooden installation on the streets of Beijing. José has been painting "Dutch Landscapes" for the past few years, following a rule-based process. The previous series was printed on paper and published under Ruja Press. After a discussion with the artists, abC produced the graphic lines as the physical ones, inviting local friends who are active in self-publishing to bring the installation to the streets and document its nomadic routes and the landscape recreated with the installation. All photos and archives will be exhibited at the abC Art Book Fair and compiled into a publication.
E13 Draw in Rolling Hills at Dawn
Artist: LWT
Modern world is deemed as a sophisticated and busy department store. “Totem”, an ancient thing which is contrary to “modern”, stands impressively on the opposite side of this huge department store. Totem is the product of animism. In the clan society, people tend to develop a “kinship” with natural objects and further regard these natural objects as their “relatives”, friends, helpers, ancestors, tutelary and even as “symbols” of their tribe. Totem is derived from the North American Indian language, which means “kinship” and “mark”.
They wander aimlessly in the rough and winding Miao village. Just like “Totem”, every natural object develops a special kinship of “healing” no matter on the mountain roads or in the village. This idea will undoubtedly be referred to be extravagant in modern society for example Franz Kafka retells the story of Prometheus, saying “Nach der vierten wurde man des grundlos Gewordenen müde.” (The wound heals in weariness.) On the way down the road, the cowshed suddenly appears! At that moment, there is a vague relationship between the cowshed and the artist. That moment, as Walter Benjamin mentions in the definition of “Aura”, is in a state of flux. That still image is composed of flowing moments under Aura.
LWT earned her master’s degree in Art Direction at Penninghen, School of Art Direction and Interior Architecture. Her forms of work include: paintings, sculptures, publications, etc. Her early creation focused on woodcut. In 2019, she expanded her study of symbol from plane to space. “Bao”, one of her sculptures, is inspired by her imagination of the Wishing Pond and is the result of her reflection over social phenomena, idol worship, and consumerism. In 2020, because of the pandemic, she was held up in North Europe. As she lived close to nature and the animals, the transition of her colors and pictures is purer, more original and folkish. And her creations tend to express directly her observation and reflection over the relationship between human and the environment.
The 7th abC Art Book Fair · Hangzhou
2022.9.9-9.12
Special Projects
Newly-added
E12 kiss & ride
Artist: Jianfei Chen, Dan Li, Sheng Yi, Nuoran Zhang
Curator: Chang Lan
E04 Meyer Lemons
Artist: Ronghui Chen
Collab：Chenronghuiphoto, Nizhen
Curator: Moyan Liu
Curator: Bowei Yang, cusp.
E14 Eastwards, Five meters away
Artist: 某MouHoo (Zhewei Hu)
The 7th abC Art Book Fair · Beijing
2022.7.28-7.31
We are happy to announce that the 7th abC Art Book Fair · Beijing will be held at Beijing Quanyechang Cultural Arts Center from July 28th to July 31st, 2022. There will be 148 local publisher booths and 40 international publishers on a commissioned basis, bringing thousands of art publications this summer.
In 2022, abC Art Book Fair, with the theme of 「 Nomadic and Imagined 」, invites you to explore and imagine a free-roam adventure. The themed exhibition will occupy the first floor and an exhibition hall on the second floor with 3 Curated Selections, 7 Solo Projects/Works, 3 Special Projects, and 1 Sound Project.
The revelation of nomadism today prompts us to be alert to changes in ecology and climate; It represents the possibility of free and loose organization, flexible and effective action, decentralization, and breaking boundaries. Through "nomadism," we can find the "ligne de fuite" (Deleuze), find ways to coexist with differences in changing practices, understand the unknown chaos of the world, and let our free imagination reach far and wide.
E05 Go Nomadic Together —— Rituals and Daily Life
Artists: Ariuntugs Tserenpil（Mongolia）,Gu Tao, Enkhbold Togmidshiirev（Mongolia）,Oyunerdene, NiNi Dongnier, Shinetana, LKhajav, Burenerdene (Quanbao), Urgen, Liu Chengrui, Zulan (Lv Jiajia), Timur Si-Qin（Germany）
Curators: Li Yuhang, Chyanga
Co-presenter：Rhizomic Space
Since Enlightenment thought, the once self-deprecating man gave up religious sanctity to embrace individual supremacy in the contemporary world. Rituals do not only connect horizontally, but also vertically with parallel sacred spaces. The connections made by rituals bring us back to the ritual itself, where the objects that appear in the ritual are not fetishistic embodiments, but rather connect to the sacred through the 'object'. To think about the sacredness of the ritual is also to rethink our relationship with objects and with our surroundings. The exhibition presents a connection not only to the supernatural sacred, but also to a sense of 'us' as sacredness, a symbiotic whole of human and divine and other species.
“Go Nomadic Together” is a call for effort against the loss of balance in present days. Based on the consensus the artists reached, a new community is formed and a “tribe”is born of the project. Rich in contemporary significance, it is made up of people from diversified cultural backgrounds who stick to their artistic uniqueness while keeping group consensus and collective memory and try to explore new possibilities through exchange of ideas. ”Go Nomadic Together” builds a field of experiment where people of different cultural backgrounds show empathy and seek what they have in common and a shared way out. It also shows how these artists reflect on our disrupted, lost world and meditate, feel, deconstruct and reconstruct by virtue of “nomadism”.
Gu Tao
E12 Back to Nature
Artists: Zheng Bo、Claudeverett、Henk Wildschut
Curator: BE WATER JOURNAL
In the past century, the so-called "modern civilization" dominated by industrialization and urbanization has not only transformed the planet's surface on a large scale, but also profoundly affected the lives of all people.The wildfires in the Amazon rainforest, polar ice are melting as global warming, the emergence of climate refugees, and even the occurrence of outbreak epidemics have made us realize that "environmental issues" is the most urgent topic we need to pay attention to and discuss. Behind the environmental issues, we hope to explore the following questions in depth: What is our relationship with nature today?As Orientals, do we still believe the theory that “heaven and man are united as one”? What is nature? In this era, does nature need to be redefined?
In the 3rd issue “Nature” of the annual publication Be Water Journal, we try to sort out the changes in the natural world and the reasons behind them, and also try to re-establish our connection with nature, from various fields and clues, such as ecological art practice, natural design architecture and community construction, indigenous wisdom, field recording, traditional Chinese medicine and Oriental Taoist Culture etc.
In our exhibition, we would invite three interviewees from the 3rd issue of Be Water Journal, including Zheng Bo、Henk Wildschut、Claudeverett, to share their works about nature and ecology.
Zheng Bo，2015
E15 Secret Balcony
Artists & Writers：Bai Lin, Bao Huiyi, David Szalay, Gu Xiang, Guo Yujie, Jan Carson, John Freeman, Julie Koh, Lan Lan, Liang Shuang, Lin Bai, Liu Shuwei, Lu Xiaoyu, Lu Ye, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, Shen Yi, Sun Xun, Wang Bang, Wu Ang, Wu Qi, Zhang Dinghao, Zhang Sai, Zong Cheng, Zoo, Yu Mo, and more
Curator: One-Way Street Journal
Who would not want to get the time back which has been encroached by the epidemic for three years? Driven by it, One-Way Street Journal has been collecting, publishing, and distributing a large number of diaries, poems, images, and sounds produced under the "state of exception". We have taken more time to compile the "secret" texts, weaving together the memories from common people to supplement or challenge the mainstream. The existence of the texts turned out to be necessary and important struggles, cries, and hesitation, in quarantine, lockdown, and control. When the going-out was limited, the going-indoors has been emerging as a new impetus, a space of resistance, and a desire for life, as the Spanish poet Lorca said, "¡Si muero, dejad el balcón abierto!" ("If I die, leave the balcony door open!")
Sound Project
E14 Warm Spell
KMRU (Kenya/Germany) , Aki Onda & Akio Suzuki (Japen/USA) , Tom White (UK) , Mariam Morshed (USA/UK) , Rie Nakajima (UK/Japen) , Lau Nau (Finland) , David Blamey (UK/France) , Hannah Dargavel-Leafe (UK)
Curator: David Blamey/ Continuous Tone
Warm Spell is an immersive sound installation conceived by London-based sound art label and online broadcast platform Continuous Tone. Visitors are invited to stop being busy for a moment; by pausing, resting your eyes, lying down or lingering, and reading with your ears.
Curated by one of the participating artists, David Blamey, the project is dedicated to the idea of travelling without moving. The sounds vibrating within the space will transport you beyond the immediate urban setting to the warmth of a succession of far away places.
Poster Design：Xu Ke
E02 Multi-identities of the Plant
Learn how to get along with the plants, actively, passively and subtly. The selction of books from “Multi-identities of the Plant” will carry your body and mind to travel through the gaps between pages and leaves, between nature and city, between the practice of observing and acting… These green creatures may seem to be too static and passive in common sense, however, they may incarnate into a new unit for perceiving the world gradually. Leaves and branches, trees and flowers can begin to record the passage of time and the reincarnation of life; to reflect the signs of growth and decay, memory and forgetting, permanence and change.
E06 Dining-table Odyssey
We gather for food, and food accompanies us whenever we travel and migrate. We meet with dishes on plates and drink with the moon in wine glasses; colors and aromas are mixed with our memories and touch us through pots and pans.
In the "Dining-table Odyssey" series, food, like paper, can be seen as a medium, where cooking is also a creation, and readers are also diners. In the cumulative dining experience, our relationship with food is gradually woven into a web of mixed flavors... so we read, eat, and cherish every day with the everyday.
Solo Project
E03 Plant Whisper
Artists: Plants, Wanlin Jiang, Yunling Wu
Plant Whisper is a collaborative research project by plant adventurer Wanlin Jiang and digital artist Yunling Wu, focusing on the visualisation of plants dancing in the wind.
Collection of images and information -
Analysis of movement points -
Output of dynamic records -
Collation of static visualisations - Archiving -
Experimentation with derivative art forms.
Curiosity, observation, documentation and archiving of the natural aesthetics embedded in the plants themselves was our starting point, but in one interaction after another, our consideration of the relative relationship between humans and plants continued to evolve.
What do these beautiful poetic and mysterious symbols mean? Are we using human concepts to decode the language of plants in a way that we think is correct? There are still no answers yet. Rather than being the answerer, we offer the perspective of the questioner in the hope of evoking a little thought in the viewer.
Medium: Website, Archive, Book, Experimental Video, Installation
E04 Immediacy
Artist: Loh Xiang Yun
www.lohxiangyun.com
“The essence of time is captured in plant specimens that transcend the past, the present, and the future. ” Singapore-based artist and scientific botanical illustrator Loh Xiangyun will create a fabric work “Immediacy" for abC art book fair. In 2021, Luo Xiangyun completed her publication "Microscopic Images" together with Temporary Press. This book contains photos of plant specimens that Xiangyun used as a reference when drawing botanical illustrations, and also restores the process of her completing the illustrations. Over the years, Xiangyun has collected as many as 3,000 plant photos. She is going to select the plant photos, print them on fabrics of different materials, hand-sewn a 7-meter-long fabric work.
E07 The Last Spring Plowing
Artist: Pen Pa
Curator: Chakhang Art Festival
"With the city's expansion, all the farmland in our village was expropriated. Faced with the imminent loss of land, I feel that I have so much to say but don't know where to start. In the spring of 2016, my family and I plowed the land for the last time on the barley field that would soon be converted to other uses. And the whole process was recorded on video. At the end of the plowing, three of us brothers filled a bag of soil for each family as a souvenir and said goodbye to the land we had been farming for generations."
-- Artist Pen Pa
Pen Pa, a Tibetan, was born in 1974 in Dulong Deqing County, Lhasa, Tibet. He studied at Hefei Teachers' College in Anhui Province and Hebei Normal University. He graduated from the School of Art of Tibet University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2013. His works involve painting, video, performance, installation, collage, and other forms. He has held or participated in many art exhibitions globally.
The work "The Last Spring Plowing" is presented by the Chakhang Art Festival Through painting, installation, and video, the Tibetan artist Pen Pa commemorates the lost connection to the earth in the context of urban expansion.
E08 Anything That Flies
Artist: Ruben Lundgren
Many of the wonderful dishes presented in this album go far beyond the common art of plating. The food reliefs, radish sculptures and other eatable delights were created for professional food competitions or served as example wedding plates from the 1980s onwards. The temporarily appearance most likely won over it’s flavour, but who would care. Although chickens don’t fly nor bath much, they are well represented just like the cranes, ducks and the occasional sparrow. Yes, an exception was made for two lovely flying fish. Don’t forget to look at the side of the plates as well. Not only will you find some of the best baijiu but also, for the true photo-detective, a canned feast of tomato sauce and Flying Wheel luncheon meat.
Beijing-based photographer and curator Ruben Lundgren received his masters’ degree photography from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He made a name within the conceptual photography duo WassinkLundgren with award winning publications as Empty Bottles (2007) and Tokyo Tokyo (2010). He now works as a photojournalist for Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, and as an independent curator of Chinese photography.
E09 Vine Practices
Artist: Qindi Hu
The paths that cross the neighborhoods, the trails that pass through the woods in the hills, the vision weaving, the dough fermenting, the paper binding.
The looping curves connect the everyday life. Looking back, the connections between things become clear and concrete. Sometimes the thread is also left to roll, and the next place it randomly points may hide a new glass marble.
That's the hint about this tabletop display: it contains some trajectory of the making process. If you also like to whip egg whites and cream or write in fancy script, you can certainly start by making cookies and carving a woodcut. Just migrate between ingredients and materials in the kitchen or living room. Thank you, food, for bringing me satiety and anticipation.
E10 Fortune Desserts
Artist: Tofoodesign ( Yue LIU and Xijing XU)
Invented by the Japanese in the 19th century, fortune cookies have traveled overseas along the paths of immigrants and were carried forward by Chinese-Americans throughout the turbulent history. It is presented in the Chinese restaurant at the end of the meal as an alternative to dessert. This humble biscuit, not well known in the East Asian Chinese-speaking world, has gradually become the ambassador of Chinese food overseas. In Chinese restaurants in Italy, a large bowl is often placed at the entrance counter, from which customers can take a fortune cookie at the checkout. For Xijing and Yue, who grew up in mainland China and moved to Europe, it is a moment of re-encounter with the East Asian immigrants of a century ago, thousands of miles away from home.
On the map of food wandering, the two designers trace the history of human migration and movement between continents and oceans and the trajectory of their personal lives. At the end of the exhibition, they have embedded some dessert recipes from their cross-cultural life experiences into the fortune cookies as a 'post-exhibition dessert'. They hope these recipes will also find their way into your kitchens to achieve their cultural wandering and the taste wandering across the borders of the two designers.
E11 Dutch Landscape in Beijing
Artist: José Quintanar
"Dutch Landscape," a series of drawings by the Spanish artist, architect, and publisher José Quintanar, will go on a "nomadic" journey in the form of wooden installation on the streets of Beijing. José has been painting "Dutch Landscapes" for the past few years, following a rule-based process. The previous series was printed on paper and published under Ruja Press. After a discussion with the artists, abC produced the graphic lines as the physical ones, inviting local friends who are active in self-publishing to bring the installation to the streets and document its nomadic routes and the landscape recreated with the installation. All photos and archives will be exhibited at the abC Art Book Fair and compiled into a publication.
E13 Draw in Rolling Hills at Dawn
Artist: LWT
Modern world is deemed as a sophisticated and busy department store. “Totem”, an ancient thing which is contrary to “modern”, stands impressively on the opposite side of this huge department store. Totem is the product of animism. In the clan society, people tend to develop a “kinship” with natural objects and further regard these natural objects as their “relatives”, friends, helpers, ancestors, tutelary and even as “symbols” of their tribe. Totem is derived from the North American Indian language, which means “kinship” and “mark”.
They wander aimlessly in the rough and winding Miao village. Just like “Totem”, every natural object develops a special kinship of “healing” no matter on the mountain roads or in the village. This idea will undoubtedly be referred to be extravagant in modern society for example Franz Kafka retells the story of Prometheus, saying “Nach der vierten wurde man des grundlos Gewordenen müde.” (The wound heals in weariness.) On the way down the road, the cowshed suddenly appears! At that moment, there is a vague relationship between the cowshed and the artist. That moment, as Walter Benjamin mentions in the definition of “Aura”, is in a state of flux. That still image is composed of flowing moments under Aura.
LWT earned her master’s degree in Art Direction at Penninghen, School of Art Direction and Interior Architecture. Her forms of work include: paintings, sculptures, publications, etc. Her early creation focused on woodcut. In 2019, she expanded her study of symbol from plane to space. “Bao”, one of her sculptures, is inspired by her imagination of the Wishing Pond and is the result of her reflection over social phenomena, idol worship, and consumerism. In 2020, because of the pandemic, she was held up in North Europe. As she lived close to nature and the animals, the transition of her colors and pictures is purer, more original and folkish. And her creations tend to express directly her observation and reflection over the relationship between human and the environment.