BOOKTALKS| Between Squares - the Spatial Architecture of Book Design

2025-02-08

Sat

15:30

16:30

Speaker

Hei Shing Chan Hong Kong Book Designer, Author of Alchemist: Exploring the Beauty of Books

Location

Winsing Art Place (No. 6, Lane 10, Lane 180, Section 6, Section 6, Minquan East Road, Neihu District, Taipei City)

Fee

Free Admission (Advance registration required/ $150 on-site bookshop admission fee, discounts on books and drinks)

Introduction

Hong Kong book designer Hei Shing Chan will share experiences from contemporary book creators through interviews and visits to various studios, publishers, and bookstores in this lecture. By examining their aesthetic perspectives, mature publishing practices, and market strategies, the talk aims to broaden readers’ perceptions of “books,”prompt public reflection on how “the beauty of books” extends to “the beauty of the city,” and spark further discussion.

Winsing Art Place and Joint Publishing HK jointly present two book-sharing lectures, featuring Westley Wong, author of Ink & The City: Applied Calligraphy of Hong Kong, and Hei Shing Chan, author of Alchemist: Exploring the Beauty of Books. Through their respective works, they will guide readers in discovering the calligraphic culture embodied by Hong Kong’s signage and the experiences of contemporary Hong Kong book design. The lectures will be held consecutively on the afternoon of February 8th. We invite you to join us at the bookstore for discussion and exchange.

Event Recap

Designing a book or an architectural structure may seem vastly different, yet both fundamentally revolve around structure, space, proportion, and systems. Hei Shing Chan, founder of Hei Shing Book Design and a Hong Kong-based book designer, delves into the spatial concepts inherent in book design, offering accessible insights into the underlying logic of book production. Using his own works as examples, he shares practical aspects of the creative process.

The book Alchemist: Exploring the Beauty of Books, crafted over eight years, likens book design to alchemy. It is “refined” through three stages: comprehension, deconstruction, and reconstruction. The cover design resembles pixels disintegrating and reassembling, with a blank corner revealing the book’s six visually distinct chapters. Each chapter corresponds to its theme through six different sizes, layouts, color palettes, and paper textures. Unlike typical designer profiles that focus mainly on their works, the interviews with Taiwanese and Hong Kong designers in this book explore their design methodologies and how their personalities manifest in their creations. The entire book flows seamlessly, with both content and binding echoing the process of a book’s creation from nothing.

Like the layered binding of Alchemist: Exploring the Beauty of Books, Chan began experimenting with such techniques a decade ago. In 2015, when Taiwanese architect Chu-Joe Hsia was invited to Hong Kong Polytechnic University for a symposium, the accompanying booklet The Tale of Three Cities was designed by Chan. He combined the iconic skylines of Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shenzhen with special die-cutting and paper materials to create a layered binding, reflecting the symposium’s discussion of the three cities. This design approach was revisited in Hong Kong Reminiscence: Document of Hong Kong’s Old Stores. The designer incorporated visual elements of Hong Kong’s old stores—colorful mosaic tiles, street corners with old shops, and perforated iron gates—through printing techniques, dimensional layering, and die-cutting. This allows readers to feel as though each layer of these shops’ stories is revealed with each turn of the page.

Japanese book designer Kohei Sugiura, who has a background in architectural design, once said, “If we compare space to a book, the book has a cover and is a whole. Opening a book involves the cover, endpapers, title page; then, it’s the main text, the story, and the story concludes. Closing the book evokes the same sensation as entering a space.” Through this sharing, we hope readers will pay attention to its design the next time they pick up a book. Perhaps they will discover the same joy as stepping into an intriguing building.