Our photo theme this week: Remaking Baitasi. Baitasi is a monument in west-central Beijing, named after the Yuan Dynasty White Stupa Temple. In recent years, it’s also become a site of Beijing Design Week, an annual, city-wide program showcasing leading ideas in urban design. Some background on Baitasi and its recent evolution into a BJDW “core area” here. We’ll finish this week’s photo series off with some snaps of “Fair Enough,” a pop-up book fair organized by Beijing hutong gallery I: Project Space. Started as a residency in central Beijing, I: Project Space last year opened a second venue in Baitasi, where their resident artists now live and work, mixing with the hutong community on the street level. They’ve had projects in Baitasi since it first became included as a “core area” of Beijing Design Week in 2015. For this year’s project, they organized an “art book world tour” around the theme of “talking about community”: Our aim is to develop new concepts for printed matter and to constantly reinvent and confront new realities of mediation. Therefore, tria publishing platform which is located in Zurich and Beijing teamed up with three other ground-breaking publishing houses from Switzerland (edition fink, Boabooks and Jungle Books) to push the dialogue on what publishing is and can be even further. Our collaboration “Fair Enough” is travelling various book fairs all around the world with destinations like “I Never Read” in Basel, “Offprint” London, “Tokyo Art Book Fair” or “Offprint Paris”. For the BJDW 2017 we want to bring our ongoing discussion to China and invite other publishing houses and designers in China to exchange on new concepts of book design. For this BJDW we will create a mobile book station that will bring the conversation to various hubs of the design week.
