A little over a year ago, Rapzunel left home and traveled from New York to Delaware then to Maryland. Now she's back with me.

When the package was dropped off by the art handler, I couldn't wait to open it, as if it were a present. I opened the box excitedly, then felt a little bit emotional. I truly missed her!

Friends know that I have a detest for the summer in New York. While I am still enjoying the last leg of spring, I am already dreading for the heat waves coming in the next few months. I am not kidding.

However, with two upcoming shows in the city this Summer, that would possibly make New York City Summer a more bearable for me! Hot!

Phoenix Gallery (June 22 - July 16, 2011)

Opening next week is my solo at Phoenix Gallery. The show will feature a number of pieces, including Hokusai's Yurei (2011) and Rapunzel #2 (2011). (To go along with the show, I will be writing about the process behind these two pieces in the coming weeks.)

From the press release:

No. 19 is Phoenix Gallery’s 19th Annual Juried Competition and is curated and juried by Renée Vara. The show, taking its cue from Bauhaus philosophy, suggests that the impulse to create an aesthetic that unifies fine art, design, and fashion, has come to full completion. Dennis Yuen was awarded the solo show. The exhibition will also feature 4 finalists – David Bogus, John Breiner, Heechan Kim, and Rebecca Rose.

The Center for Book Arts (July 6, 2011 - September 10, 2011)
Then throughout the rest of summer, Pages (2011) will be hung in the air-conditioned Center for Book Arts while I sweat like crazy on the streets. The show is entitled The Un(framed) Photograph, curated by Alexander Campos and Doug Beube.

This exhibition, featuring current members of CBA's artistic community and other invited artists whose work will further the discourse, will focus on how the art of photography, the photographic process, and related media such as video stills are used to convey content, form, text, and image within a broader context of book arts practices. Artworks featured in this exhibition will represent a broad range of book and related arts, including but not limited to books, prints, sculpture, mixed-media installation, new media, and performance art.

In 2011, Rapunzel will be on the move.

From now until April 2011, she is at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, joining other works from esteemed artists including Melissa Jay Craig, Brian Dettmer, Miriam Schaer and Buzz Spector. The exhibition addresses "the themes of the book as object, subject, and concept."

And in Fall, she will travel with the show to Towson University in Maryland.

Meet her.

The Book: A Contemporary View

Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
Dec 22, 2010 - Apr 17, 2011

Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson University
Sep 8 - Nov 5, 2011

Throughout the month of December last year, I was working on a piece that I hoped would help me to try working in an obsessive mode. Rapunzel involved cutting up about half a mile of cotton twine into 3- to 4-feet pieces, and gluing them individually onto a two-needle coptic bound book. If stretched wide, it spans about 7 feet, and is definitely the largest piece I've done so far.

Rapunzel is the first piece in a series that re-tells familiar children stories though books, but only through the physicality of these books. Every material in this book is white (or off-white), so the viewer is confronted with its physical form, and forced to address it. Embodied into its binding and form, the essence of Rapunzel can be seen and touched through the physical book.

See more pictures of Rapunzel on Studio CaiLun.

Braided Tapes and The Shopping B(ag)ook are traveling back to Indiana. This time, they are going to Ball State University. They will be shown alongside with work from other artists: painting, drawing, mixed media, printmaking, photography, ceramics, sculpture, jewelry, and video.



Reclaim, Reuse, Renew
August 25 - September 26, 2009
Atrium Gallery, Art and Journalism Building
Ball State University
2000 W. University Ave, Muncie, IN 47306
http://www.bsu.edu/art/atrium

Visit Studio CaiLun for more pictures of Braided Tapes and The Shopping B(ag)ook.

I've completed the set of black and white books. First came the white volume, then the black. My idea was to create a pair of books in Secret Belgian binding with contrasting qualities.

The neat-looking threads on the spine is one of the many reasons why I love Secret Belgian bindings. But in this set, these usually equally-separated threads are distributed on the spine in gradation. The directions of gradation on the two books are opposite of each other.

Rob Matthew's 5000-page fully printed physical Wikipedia book.

As I previewed before, a new addition to my repertoire is a book made entirely out of my own handmade paper. This book uses 3 sheets of handmade denim plus corn husk paper (the bluish pages) and 1 sheet with "Angel Wings" botanical elements (the yellowish pages).

The binding is a single-sheet onto tapes, allowing each page to be fully opened flat. Since each sheet was made with a substantial thickness, it gives the book a strong body and allows it to stand firmly on its own.

The tapes used are linen tapes, which are often used in traditional bookbinding. They do not attached to any cover board, in fact, this book doesn't really have a cover. I realize that I tend to skip covers for my sculptural work, as most of the time the book block (the group of signatures) seems to be sufficient as a piece by itself.

It's interesting for me to see that the entire book block is being displayed. It's true that exposed bindings such as coptic allow a peek of the signatures, but the covers also cover up most of them. As for a sculptural piece, which is not being used daily, why not taking the covers away so that the we can see and admire the entire book block at its bare form?


Visit Studio CaiLun for more pictures of Braided Tapes.