Chloe Chen 陈翘楚

This project explores the spatiality of book design by using the LCC Tower Block as both site and metaphor—treating the building itself as a book. It reflects on and imagines new ways of reading and engaging with the materiality of the book in the digital era.

The inspiration comes from Ulises Carrión’s ‘The New Art of Making Books’, in which he states that “A book is a space-time sequence”. Developed from my dissertation, ‘What is Offered to the Spatiality of Book Design by Viewing It Through an Architectural Perspective, and Why Is It Important?—with a focus on contemporary art books’, I created an installation consisting of 20 book objects, each labelled with page numbers and excerpts from ‘The New Art of Making Books’, placed on each floor of the Tower Block building.

Audiences were invited to read this ‘book’/‘building’ by taking the lift in any sequence they wished, and by taking pictures of the objects to emphasis the movement of how they read. Through this process of discovering, interacting, reading, waiting (for the lift), and feeling the distance between the ‘pages’, participants perceived both space and time as integral elements of the book.

The publication documents the project, including the images of the installations and how the audience interact with them. It consists of 13 layered sheets, each representing one floor—from the first to the thirteenth—recording the installation on each floor. By folding each sheet twice and layering them together, an unbound structure is formed, allowing the audience to rearrange the sequence of floors and create unexpected, random layouts. This reflects the nonlinear reading experience facilitated by the project.

This book explores and reinterprets the concept of ‘emptiness’ (空, kōng) through Chinese word formation, imagery, and bookbinding.

By ‘empty’ (kong), I mean not only emptiness, but also gaps in time, space in power, autonomy in education, rights in expression, space in relationships, and more... ‘Emptiness’ is so important in our lives and yet often overlooked.

This book contains 14 things that include the word ‘empty’ in Chinese phrases. Each one is visually deconstructed and explained using images ranging from the vastness of the universe to something as ordinary as an air conditioner. It uncovers the diversity ‘empty’ contains from a fresh angle.

The linguistic gap between Chinese and English, and the bilingual nature of the intended audience, became both a challenge and a design structure for this book. Here, images serve as a mode of translation and universal understanding.

This book’s form and its content are highly intertwined. This book can be flipped and read from three different directions, each yielding a coherent experience—with no restrictions, like emptiness itself.

Bookshelves are usually stuffed to the brim with no gaps; they are filled with knowledge and individuals, just like schools and education. It is the empty space where imagination and innovation can unfold.

Why can the same length and width template hold all the books? There are books that don’t fit in, books that fall out, books that are twisted in order to fit in. Why are books mostly the same size? Is the need to be sold and displayed in bookshelves part of what limits their shape shifting? And the fact that students are educated by uniform standards and lack the space to think and choose on their own is also limiting personality development. What happens on the bookshelf can tell some stories and be a metaphor for some phenomena.