BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair 2024

BOOKED open hours
August 30, 2024: 2–7pm
August 31–September 1, 2024: 12–7pm

Tai Kwun Contemporary’s BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair is back for its sixth year. Held from August 30 to September 1, 2024, the latest edition hosts the largest number of exhibitors since its inception: over 110 local and international publishers, artists, booksellers and organisations will be featured across all floors of JC Contemporary at Tai Kwun. The three-day event will also feature a robust series of programmes (displays, performances, talks, workshops), together with Code.Xcess in the Artists’ Book Library. The special project explores how artists play with “codes”—using calendars, cartoons, dictionaries, digital programming language, guidebooks, karaoke, and more—to rethink how such structures form and affect our knowledge, understanding, and behaviour.

This year’s BOOKED: promises to be another exciting edition, and features a range of new and returning exhibitors from Hong Kong and abroad, including: Printed Matter (New York), The Book Society / mediabus (Seoul), Lubok Verlag (Germany), Center for Art Research and Alliances (New York), Hauser & Wirth Publishers (Hong Kong, Zurich), Zen Foto Gallery (Tokyo), one half in (Zhejiang), In Plain Words (Singapore), and more. Various exhibitors in this year’s art book fair present publications that explore the idea of regeneration, be it rediscovering tradition, revitalising talent, or reinventing convention. From new publications to their articulation through timely projects and thought-provoking public programmes, this edition of the fair will offer various cultural and artistic perspectives to reimagine the familiar.

One of the key projects is the Artists’ Book Library’s Code.Xcess (August 30, 2024–September 1, 2024, and then September 26, 2024–February 23, 2025), curated by Tai Kwun’s Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and Nick Thurston from the University of Leeds. Their multi-disciplinary project—with works by Chia Amisola, Chang Yuchen, Joe Gilmore, Pablo Helguera, and Lazarus Chan adorning screens, walls, and windows throughout the library—considers the creative role publishing plays as both a source and medium for artists circumventing established systems of generating, organising, and circulating knowledge. Also on view will be selections from the Artists’ Book Library’s ongoing collection of Asian artists’ books, as well as other publications which reveal the generic features of reference volumes (calendars, dictionaries, manuals), reimagine their logic systems (alphabet, digital coding, networked connections), and acknowledge the roles (archivist, editor, translator) of those who collect, maintain, and circulate their contents. There will also be public programmes which consider how the seemingly established formats and ways we learn and share continue to evolve.

Visitors to BOOKED: are encouraged to revisit their schemas of truth, extending their perceptions of books as mediums both of information and artistic expression, as well as questioning our ordinary experiences.

Such exploration of systems of knowledge extends playfully, too, to the artworks by Gaylord Chan (1925–2020), who at times used computer programmes as a point of departure in making art. The six colourful flags, Search, Concentrate, Combine, Expand, Hold and Embrace—originally created for the historic D Hall windows in 2018, and indeed echo elements of Tai Kwun’s historic space—are now once again hung over the run of the art book fair. Other projects include a special display by the lens-based artist Sheung Yiu, originally from Hong Kong but based in Finland, who will also be making a lecture performance. These are complemented by a rich programme of conversations and workshops over the three days of the fair.

Tai Kwun Contemporary’s BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair is organised by Daniel Szehin Ho, Ingrid Pui Yee Chu, and Louiza Ho, with Felicity Wong, Sonia Cheng, and Valerie Sim.