TOWARDS A SHARED LANGUAGE: MAGAZINE-MAKING AS RESPONSE

'Towards a Shared Language: Magazine-making as Response' is a programme moderated by te editions, our 2025 Librarians-in-Residence. In this programme, Michael Guo and Coco Kechun Qin, Editors of te editions, will share their first public presentation in London. While te editions are a familiar presence at London’s book fairs, this programme offers a unique opportunity for a different encounter; one that moves inward, into the thinking, processes, and collaborations that shape the magazine’s distinct publishing practice. It is an invitation to dwell not only on the surfaces of printed matter, but alongside the trajectories, resonances, and relations that it sustains.

The programme will kick off with a presentation by Guo and Qin with te editions' Art Director Can Yang, inviting our audience to peer into the conceptual and material life of the magazine. Together, they will unpack how visual and editorial strategies are developed in tandem and how rhythm, sequencing, and typography function not simply as aesthetics, but as ways of shaping reading and meaning for a publication. The presentation will be followed by a curated screening of short films by artists Moe Satt and Ye Wuji, long-time collaborators of the publication, whose contributions engage diasporic narratives through poetic visual and textual forms. Ye will join us in person to reflect on their published work, and on the dynamics of working across distance, language, and time, revealing the durational and dialogic nature of te editions' publishing as a situated and relational practice.

Following the public programme, Elaine Tam, writer, curator, and Senior Editor at FIELDNOTES, will host a creative writing workshop, delving into shared affinities between the London-based, artist-run publishing project and te editions in its ways of working with, and speaking through artistic practices. Titled ‘Illegible’, the workshop explores translation, displacement, and the fragment and considers slippages in meaning as generative sites of poetic potential and a way of engaging with questions of diasporic belonging. Taking cues from writers and thinkers Qiu Miaojin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Sarat Maharaj, as well as our library, we explore techniques of redaction, over-writing and montage. Through a series of informal exercises, participants are encouraged to experiment with ideas of writing between and around.

As a workshop focused on process rather than outcomes, all levels of writing experience are welcome. The workshop has a limited capacity of twelve participants.

PROGRAMME SCHEDULE

2.00—3.00PM Presentation by te editions with Can Yang

3.00—3.15PM Break

3.15—4.15PM Screening programme with introduction by te editions

- Moe Satt, Hands around Zuid, 2025

- Ye Wuji, Something Misplaced, 2023

4.15—4.30PM Conversation between Ye Wuji and te editions

4.30—5.00PM Conclusion Public Programme

5.00—6.30PM Sign-up only: Creative writing workshop with Elaine Tam

ACCESS INFORMATION

The full programme takes place on the ground floor with step-free access in our multi-purpose programme space, with a fully accessible, all-gender bathroom. Please feel free to inquire with info@asymmetryart.org if you would like to discuss any access needs. Please kindly be advised that requests should be made one week in advance of the event, and we will try our best to make accommodations subject to availability.

Image courtesy of te editions