Shortlists offer thematic selections from AAA Collections, including overviews and annotations by invited contributors. The following shortlist by Ruby Weatherall looks at artists’ books that creatively reframe archival materials to reflect on time, history, and memory.

 

Artists’ books come in all shapes and sizes. Usually published in multiple editions and accessible to a wide audience, they also exist as unique works. Artists’ books can be commissioned by institutions, or self-published and circulated without an International Standard Book Number (ISBN). They allow artists to experiment with the book format and try out new printing processes, materials, and displays of images in relation to text, often leading to boundary-pushing designs. Sitting at the intersection of art, design, literature, and documentation, artists’ books resist clear definitions. They offer insight into an artist’s inner world and provide direct engagement with their practice through holding, flipping, reading, and imagining. 

The self-publishing scene in Asia has evolved significantly in recent years. In places with fewer local exhibition opportunities, making books allows artists to circulate their work on the page. Artists’ books that mainly feature photo-based art are especially popular, also known as photobooks. The establishment of artist’s book libraries, independent art bookstores, and annual art book fairs across the region has also increased circulation of artists’ books and access to information on self-publishing and bookmaking practices.  

Two insightful and creatively collated publications include A Book Lover’s Guide to China and Its Self-Publishing and Tropical Reading: Photobook & Self-Publishing, which introduce the artists, bookstores, archives, and initiatives at the centre of the independent publishing scene in China and Southeast Asia. Other useful references include Artists’ Publications, The Photobook: A History (Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III); The Chinese Photobook: From the 1990s to the Present; and Xerox Project, which looks at the relationship between art and printing technologies. The catalogue for Reading Room: An Exhibition Featuring Artists' Books and Altered Book Art is also helpful for learning about artists’ books in the context of South Asia. 

Did you know there are more than 300 artists’ books in AAA’s library? As part of AAA’s Curatorial team, I have spent the past year researching (and falling in love) with them. This shortlist is part of a wider project we launched to promote artists’ books as valuable sites of primary research in AAA Collections. In 2024, we released an intimate series of reels that introduce one book at a time, shared our team’s top picks, and presented a display as part of our library exhibition Countering Time. We hope to highlight the magic of artists’ books for learning about specific artistic practices and strategies for storytelling in the region. 

This shortlist highlights eight artists’ books that creatively reframe materials from the past to consider how things are recorded and remembered. Each artist draws on personal or public archival materials to explore ideas of time, history, and memory using their own visual language. Through techniques related to the book format—such as sequencing, layering, and annotating—they stage the process of archival documentation as playful, subjective, and non-linear. In a polarised world where micro-narratives are often overshadowed by grand histories, they privilege a personal approach to archiving memory that encourages interpretation. This includes using family and oral histories, everyday ephemera, and speculative field recordings to reflect on what is preserved and how memories can change over time.  

The list has evolved from an initial selection of artists’ books on display in AAA’s library as part of Countering Time. The exhibition presents new works by Merve Ünsal, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Lee Weng Choy, who speculate on the immeasurability of time. Together, they demonstrate how archives are sites of imagination instead of final resting places of historical records. This has never felt truer than when looking through the artists’ books at AAA. Offering access to original experiments by artists that push the limits of publishing and their practice, these books transform the archive into a space for artistic research and creative discovery. 

 

Lertchaiprasert, Kamin. Before Birth–After Death. Bangkok: Numthong Gallery, 2012. Edition of 1,000. [MON.LEK2] 

Kamin Lertchaiprasert draws on personal archival materials and his daily practice of making art to contemplate the meaning of life in Before Birth–After Death. The duality of the title—before and after, birth and death—is reflected in the presentation of two identical-looking publications. On closer inspection, one is a Thai lifestyle magazine that features images of Lertchaiprasert’s artworks (see pp.114–130). The other is an artist’s book that documents one of his long-term series, also titled Before Birth–After Death (2008–14). The front cover is a photocopy of the lifestyle magazine, which builds on Lertchaiprasert’s practice of layering found images with personal interventions. His work is informed by a deep interest in Buddhist philosophy and meditation and, since 1992, he has developed a distinct practice of creating one work every day to complete a single series over several years. In the book, artworks and everyday ephemera, including letters, tickets, receipts, packaging, and postcards, are overlaid with drawings of skulls, which the artist associates with impermanence. Lertchaiprasert draws on the visual aesthetic of the lifestyle magazine, associated with the revolving trends of pop culture and materialism, to speculate that there is no life or death; only change. 

 

 

Onda, Aki. Diary. New York: G. Arno, 2011. Edition 59 of 300. [MONS.ONA (Closed Stack)] 

Actual-size images of forty-one brightly coloured cassette tapes, covered in notes and annotations, fill the pages of Aki Onda’s Diary. The book is paired with a playable hour-long cassette tape of two field recordings from Mexico and France layered onto each other. Onda is an artist and composer interested in the visual and aural representation of personal, collective, and historical memories. Since 1988, he has been using a portable cassette recorder to make field recordings as a sound diary. Over time, he began to combine existing cassettes with new sounds to create sonic collages. These abstracted personal memories are documented in Diary and form the series Cassette Memories (2004–ongoing), which Onda also activates through staged performances. Originally trained as a photographer, sound and vision are inextricably linked in his practice. In the book, we can listen to one of the tapes and speculate on the contents of the others based on their scribbled labels, such as “Birds Conversation Eckford Street,” “Morocco ’88,” and “Escalator at 53rd Subway.” They work together as a reminder that what we see and what we hear are equally important for shaping associated memories with specific times and places—in our daily lives, and in the archive. 

 

 

Patel, Kaamna. Dori. India: Editions JOJO, 2021. First edition of 500. [MON.PAK3] 

Dori, which means thread, is a tender record of the lifelong relationships that evolve over time. Kaamna Patel is a visual artist and bookmaker who considers every design element as integral to the telling of a personal story. This book layers intimate portraits of her grandparents, taken by Patel, with materials from her family’s archive. Now aged ninety-four and ninety-six, Ba and Dada were paired together by their parents at the ages of three and five. The book traces the deep connection that has woven between them over the years through striking documentation of their daily routine (a shared smile, a knowing look), archival images, handwritten notes, and personal ephemera, such as graduation papers and birthday cards. Bound between two covers that feature loose brushstroke paintings of Ba and Dada, Patel’s non-linear layering of memories and indexical materials invites new interpretations of her grandparents’ story and the limitless meaning of love. 

 

 

Sancaktar, Sevim. Eyelids, two friends two foes. Istanbul: Fail Books, 2019. First edition of 350. [MON.SAS17 (Closed Stack)] 

Incompleteness in the archive is the starting point for Eyelids, two friends two foes. The blink of an eyelid becomes a metaphor for the arbitrary screen between what is seen and not seen, told and not told, in the construction of historical narratives. Sevim Sancaktar is an artist, curator, and exhibition designer. This book is an extension of her practice dealing with archives, gaze, and memory. Drawing on an anonymous archive, each page features photographs of empty slide holders covered in notes and markings that relate to absent images. Each set is also surrounded by a vacant grid of traces left behind by the artist’s process of adding, moving, and removing pieces. Through the imagery of absence and loss, the artist reflects on the fragmentation of memory and the way history is woven around what we don’t know and cannot access. This is further reflected in the book’s design; each page is detachable and can be rearranged, echoing the instability of memory and how we subjectively piece together the past. 

 

 

Shanaathanan, Thamotharampillai. The Incomplete Thombu. Colombo: Raking Leaves, 2011. [MON.SHT6 (Closed Stack)] 

The Incomplete Thombu is a project about reconstructing the image of home through memory. Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan is a visual artist and founder of the Sri Lanka Archive for Contemporary Art, Architecture & Design. His work often deals with the physical displacement of Tamil migrants caused by thirty years of civil war in Sri Lanka. This publication brings together three sets of documentation to expand the ordinary form of a book: first, he invites individuals to draw a floor plan of the home they were forced to leave, paired with a short text from their oral history; second, he includes an architectural rendering of their floorplan made on the computer; and third, he creates a pastel drawing in response to each individual story. The title of the book is important—thombu is a Tamil word that relates to colonial documents used to record ownership of land. With this project, Shanaathanan reclaims the visual language of a bureaucratic file to map out the emotional boundaries of properties, rather than their land mass, and reflects on how memory is heightened when something is lost. 

 

 

Sim Chi Yin. She Never Rode That Trishaw Again. Self-Published, 2021. Edition of 600. [MON.SCY] 

She Never Rode That Trishaw Again is an attempt to reconstruct the past using traces of what is left behind. Sim Chi Yin’s research-based practice often uses archival interventions to contest and complicate colonial narratives. This book brings together found travel photographs of the artist’s late grandmother, Loo Ngan Yue, who was widowed by the British war against anti-colonial forces in Malaya, with fragments of text transcribed from family interviews. Sim uses the vernacular visual language of an old photo-album to tell her story, allowing readers to form connections with her family’s history. Reproductions of handwritten postcards even slip out between the pages, offering intimate access to private exchanges. As Loo had dementia by the time Sim was a teenager, this creative intervention into her family’s archive reflects on what it means to remember something—or someone—you never really knew, while exploring the lingering trauma of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. It is a reminder that gaps in our memory, and the archive, can always be bridged by imagination. 

 

 

Vo, Danh et al. Hannah Arendt's Library. Self-Published, 2012. Edition of 250. [REF.VOD (Closed Stack)] 

Hannah Arendt’s Library upends our understanding of an ordinary book. Cased in a bright red, hardcover box, this book project contains 376 loose-leaf cards that can be read in any order. Each features an individual image of a piece of ephemera found between the pages of Hannah Arendt’s personal library, which comprises over 4,000 volumes. Arendt (1906–75) is considered one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. The photographed materials vary widely in form and content, including postcards, publisher’s cards, poetry, book reviews, advertisements, handwritten notes, matchbook covers, stamps, and more. All are catalogued with information about where they were found, including the specific pages or chapters they marked. This book reveals the importance of archival ephemera (or the preservation of mundane materials that might otherwise be thrown away) for learning about a person’s reading habits, intellectual inspirations, and relationships, as well as the visual and design aesthetics of the time in which they lived. 

 

 

Zhao Renhui Robert. Singapore, very old tree (no. 1–30). Singapore: The Institute of Critical Zoologists, 2020. Second edition of 1000. [MON.ZHR (Closed Stack)] 

This book project documents the individual lives of trees as “living, breathing markers of history.” It is published by the Institute of Critical Zoologists, an artificial organisation created by Robert Zhao Renhui to address man’s relationship with nature through witty interventions. Zhao is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of academic ecology and conceptual photography. Here, he captures the personal relationships that have formed between individuals and trees in Singapore. The box is named after one of the oldest postcards in the National Archives of Singapore from 1904, titled Singapore, very old tree. It contains a booklet describing the personal stories related to thirty trees, thirty postcards of each tree, a fold-out map of trees of interest in Singapore, and a large-scale poster of one of the trees. The materials are informative and tactile, made to mimic the vintage tradition of hand-tinted postcards. Zhao creates space for micro-narratives to be heard while spotlighting the natural world that lives in tension with our rapidly changing cities. He emphasises the inherent value and individuality of trees, many of which existed before our time and will continue to stand long after we pass. 

 

 

This shortlist serves as an entry point into the diverse collection of artists’ books in AAA’s library, which spans a broad spectrum of topics, mediums, and languages. They are invaluable sites for learning about artists’ research concerns, speculative worlds, and formal experimentations in a tactile medium that is often different from their usual practice. Here, each artist uses archival materials to craft a personal narrative that mirrors the inherent nature of history and memory—fragmented, open-ended, and subject to interpretation. This is often echoed in the design of the books themselves, featuring multiple layers or a non-linear layout that invites readers to choose their own starting and ending points. It is this sense that we can always find the personal through a combination of memory and imagination that drives our dedication to working with artists at AAA: to make room for multiple narratives and new ways of seeing. Next time you start researching an artist or topic in the library, why not begin with their related artists’ books?  

 

Ruby Weatherall was formerly Curatorial Assistant at Asia Art Archive.

 

^{Banner image: Pages from The Incomplete Thombu by Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan.}