Tennis

Yesterday, whilst taking a break from manning the stall at the book fair, I came across a book by Giasco Bertoli consisting of a series of photographs of abandoned tennis courts, a set of melancholic images reflecting on these disused, unloved spaces. These spaces of leisure were varied in their location, from inner-city to holiday resorts, all are united in their conspicuous absence of activity. After seeing these images and watching the French Open Final today I have to say I'm quite keen to get out on a court and have a knock around...

Quiche!

Today we held a book fair at X Marks the Bokship in Bethnal Green, exhibiting the publications we've produced over the past four months in the AND Publishing workshop. I managed to sell a couple and Eleanor from the Bokship even asked to stock one of my books in the shop!

Book fair

This Saturday I'll be joining my Unit 6 group in presenting our publications at X Marks the Bokship in Bethnal Green, an independent art book shop which does much to promote self publishing with various talks and events. They've ben kind enough to host our event so if your in the area pop by and check it out!

On the road

I came across this book the other day by Pablo Leon de la Barra, who writes this really good blog. It's a photographic travel diary of a trip to his native South America, an exploration of the cities he visited and a reflection of place and community. The book's title, 'Useless Landscape', perhaps gives us a clue as to the juxtapositions he is making, focusing often on empty places that have fallen into disrepair or in-between peripheral parts of the cities that have been inhabited by people. There is something quite melancholic but also optimistic about this collection of photographs, one that looks affectionately at an area of the world where extremes of lifestyles sit side by side, a place where the peeling paint of abandoned buildings is shadowed by the presence of towering concrete skyscrapers, where the locals set up their carts for trade along empty highways. More than anything it makes me want to travel...

Free trade

This is a pirated copy from Peru of Issue 109 of Granta magazine, which itself features an essay about book pirating in Peru. Note the lines of the edges of the pages visible from scanning and reproducing on a low quality laser printer. Book piracy is a major business in Peru, with vendors acting freely and openly and many writers considering being pirated the equivalent of making the bestsellers charts. An interesting thing to consider on the day the UK celebrates World Book Night by handing out hundreds of thousands of books for free...

AND...

As I mentioned yesterday, today was the first day of a self publishing workshop I'm involved in as part of our practical unit at college. In the morning we discussed a little about what the artist book might be and the possible importance medium can have in disseminating an idea, followed by a practical session in the afternoon. In twos or threes we had to produce a publication with limited means - paper, long arm stapler, thread, photocopier - using what we could find from the library books surrounding us as source material. In my pair we settled on the idea of creating a kind of fictional encyclopaedia, with images selected from a variety of different books of art, theory, literature and history. Due to the seemingly arbitrary nature of the images and the titles we gave to each entry the encyclopaedia is not essentially intended to impart knowledge, but is more a reflection on the way in which knowledge and concepts of history and value are constructed.

Making a dummy...

The finished article...

Studio notes

Just a little documentation of my current work in progress... To give a little background to the work, I am mainly concerned with the idea of the in-between space, and have been looking at these kinds of places that occur often on the periphery of urban spaces. I am having issues with display methods, it seems to be one of the major stumbling blocks right now in terms of my work's progression, other than that I'm feeling fairly positive about the direction it is taking, and the relations being produced between the images once they are in place on the wall.

Tomorrow is the first of a five day, bi-weekly self-publishing project which I am now really looking forward to starting, I feel more and more that the work could exist particularly well in book form. The idea of a book being placeless is a concept that particularly appeals to me in relation to this body of work, a potential for the work to be distributed and received simultaneously in various locations outside of the singular space of the studio.

Currently reading

Homi K. Bhabha - The Location of Culture

I've been finding Bhabha's classic of post-colonial cultural theory a really engaging read. Writing my essay around the subject of migratory form I have found this indispensable, his notions of 'in-Betweeness' and production of self-identity within the minority, marginalised individual that exist on the periphery of existing culture in a globalised, post-colonial world have been really useful in forming my own ideas of form in relation to my essay as well as my own practice.


Irit Rogoff - Terra Infirma

Rogoff here applies the language and signifying nature of geography and its associated connotations - space, luggage, travel, belonging - to contemporary art, reflecting on the problematics of geography in terms of its masking of issues of identity and relating these issues to visual culture and the image.

Art as book

Today I learnt the next term I will be working on a project that centres around publication as a means of artistic production, run by these people at Byam Shaw, so thought I'd post a few examples from the master of the artist book, Ed Ruscha. Not sure how this fits in with my current work on the photograph as an object on the wall, but we shall see.

An old favourite

The Waves

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually." - Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Currently reading

A Post-Olympic Beijing Mini-Marathon is made up of a series of interviews with a number of Chinese artists, writers and thinkers conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist on New Years Eve, 2008. Taking the form of his now famous Serpentine Gallery Marathons, the event was an attempt to understand and evaluate the state of Beijing in the aftermath of the Olympic Games, to come to terms with the changes the city had seen and give a sense of what it is like to be living in the city at a time when it is rapidly evolving. An attempt to record history as it happened, the event focused not only on the impact of such a massive, worldwide spectacle as the Olympic Games but also issues such as the role of the Internet and the role of the artist in China today.


The book is published by JRP Ringier and beautifully produced by Vitamin Creative Space, who hosted the event at their space in Beijing.

(Photos of the Bird's Nest Stadium and CCTV Building by Dulcie Emerson)

A Week At The At The Airport

I've just finished reading Alain De Botton's A Week At The Airport, an observation of Heathrow Airport's new Terminal that he made when approached to undertake a live-in residency at the airport, spending seven days exploring the terminal, meeting the people that operate it and the customers passing through it. I was attracted to the book at first by the quote on the back cover

"a single pace that captures all the themes running through the modern world - from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel - then you would almost certainly head to an airport"

which seemed to sum up the essence of various themes I have been interested in for a while now regarding my own practice, and felt this could be a nice break from all the theory I've been attempting to plough through. Essentially De Botton's book is focused on the people that inhabit the airport, suggesting less that it is some quasi-utopian place of technology and travel full of people moving from one place to the next without a thought for the others surrounding them (although, on the surface, that is what it is) but that it is full of thousands of individual stories and dramas, a collection of individuals brought together for a brief interval of their life between destinations, a strange non-place of coming and going.

De Botton is also keen to aknowledge our unwavering faith in technology, reminding us of the awe we should feel that something so enormous as an aeroplane can move, letalone fly. He claims that the new Terminal 5 is an attampt to create a vision of how we'd like to view ourselves, celebrating technology and progress, the shimmering glass structure "proposing a new idea of Britain ... that would no longer be in thrall to its past". The book for me is a poignant and timely vignette that captures the magic that is air travel in our times, how quickly a far off exotic land becomes a distant memory on arrival and how we will always long to be back aboard a Boeing 777 flying 30,000 feet in the sky to somewhere different once again.

Book Fair Buys

Wolfgng Tillmans - Freedom From The Known, published by Steidl on the occasion of his solo show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre New York. I've been meaning to purchase a Wolfgang Tillmans book for a while now, and this cloth bound hardback was too good an opportunity to miss at £14.50. The book contains mostly abstract works alongside black and white photocopied works, and a particularly insightful essay by Bob Nickas.

Words Without Pictures, published by Los Angeles County Museum of Art, part of the Aperture series. This book initially started out as an online project in which each month an academic/practitioner/thinker would contribute an essay on a certain aspect of photography and its place in the art world, leading to online discussion forums and panel debates, which has been carefully transcribed to exist in book form.

www.jianweilim.co.uk

Let's try and revive this blog..

I moved back to London on Sunday and it almost feels like I was never away, settling a little to easily back into old routines. Anyway, as an attempt to start blogging more regularly again, here are a few things I'm looking forward to in the coming weeks...

The London Art Book Fair, held this weekend at the Whitechapel Gallery. Will have to try pretty hard not to bankrupt myself on discount books...

Launching my website, whilst I finally get past my indecisiveness and manage to finish it.

Gauguin at Tate Modern.

New releases from No Age and Deerhunter, both of which sound pretty good from what I've heard on various streams on the internet...

Ever since watching Annie Hall the other night I've also started lusting after a corduroy blazer. Whilst this stunning example from Margeret Howell may be slightly unobtainable Uniqlo do an almost identical one for a snip of the price...