Story of Open Books
In 2009, I passed through Hong Kong en route to Australia. There I bought a large number of blank folding books and handed them out. When the exhibition opened in the National Library of Wales in June 2012, there were 16 of us.
The mounting of the show in the National Library of Wales was an experience in itself that opened the way to possibilities of how I viewed the format. I realized that there were three main ways of looking at these books: there was the intimacy of holding the book in the hand and opening it page by page, reading the details in the way we are used to reading a book in its Western Codex form; then there was the potential of opening up the whole book as one panoramic image or succession of images where the eye could take in the whole as well as the parts; and lastly came the realization that the books could also be sculptural objects, to be hung vertically or twisted and curled into curves or circles in many different ways, to become, in effect, objects occupying space, yet with colours, ciphers and images ranging across their surfaces.
After the success of our first two exhibitions at National Library of Wales and BayArt Cardiff I wanted to see if we could take the exhibition further afield. I asked Professor Frank Vigneron from the Fine Art Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong - one of the first artists I had asked to be part of Open Books - if he had any ideas about this. The turning point came when he replied that he had contacts in Hangzhou and they were interested in a joint exhibition.
In November 2013, fellow Open Books artists Sue Williams and Sue Hunt joined me in taking the exhibition to the Sanshang Contemporary Art Museum in Hangzhou, China, where it accompanied the work of 40 Chinese artists in a celebration of the folding book. Here we worked together on the hanging of the exhibition with Zijin Chen and Joe Chunhang Zhu and other members of their team. It was to be the beginning of our collaborative journey. In May 2014, together with the Sanshang Museum, a group of the Chinese books was selected and taken as part of Open Books Plus to Australia, to the Logan Art Gallery in Brisbane, and from there, in June, to the University of New South Wales Academy Library in Canberra. These exhibitions were organised by Australian artist Angela Gardener, who invited new artists to join us.
In November 2014, the exhibition opened in the Art Museum of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where we were again joined by a large and impressive group of artists from China. This was a beautifully presented exhibition on which Sue Hunt, Frank Vigneron and I worked with curatorial teams from the Sanshang Museum and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In September 2016, at the invitation of Maureen McTeer, a former first lady of Canada, the exhibition added the works of 13 Canadian artists and opened at the Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Open Books artists Maggie James and Valerie C Price worked together with the exhibition team from LAC to mount a handsome exhibition. This was well attended by various diplomats from the participating countries and was marked by a demonstration of ‘giant calligraphy’ by renowned Chinese artist, Wang Dongling.
In 2017, the exhibition went on to Jaipur, India, where we were joined by 10 new artists from India. Richard Cox and Sue Hunt, who have long-standing experience of exchanges in India, curated this exhibition. They worked in collaboration with a group of internationally recognised Indian artists. Again in 2017, an exhibition 'Open Books: A New Dialogue' opened at the Charles E. Shain Library, Connecticut College in the US. Welsh Open Books artists, Sue Hunt and Thomas Martin, co-curated this selection of books together with Zhijian Qian and Yibing Huang from the US and Zijin Chen and Joe Chunhang Zhu from Hangzhou. For this exhibition a small number of US artists were added into our mix.
To most of our venues, our Chinese colleagues bring over books from their collection to display with ours. They now have the sponsorship and support of their local Zhejiang Culture Bureau for their part in this project, while we receive the support of Wales Arts International, The Arts Council of Wales and the Welsh Government.
During a Welsh Government Cultural Delegation to China in 2017, Maggie James started a conversation with curator Joe Chunhang Zhu which led to the Paper Exchange exhibition. In 2019 Open Books - led by Mary Husted and Maggie James in collaboration with BayArt, Wales - received a China/Wales Open Books Creative Wales Ambassadors Award. To mark the beginning of this a spin-off collaboration from our books exhibitions, ‘Paper Exchange’, took place in BayArt, Cardiff Bay. A team of five artists and curators came over from China and the exhibition was opened by the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford. A companion exhibition of a selection of our Open Books was also shown concurrently in Art Central, Barry Library. Paper Exchange is now due to travel to Hangzhou in China in early 2020 and we are discussing possible new venues for Open Books both nationally and internationally. The project continues.
In each new country we invite a new group of artists to join us and, occasionally, we add some artists from Wales. As an exhibition that can expand and shrink to fit its venues, it continually grows and changes. Like the books themselves, the exhibition unfolds and expands. It has become a cross-cultural exchange where we hope ideas will be shared between artists, lovers of art, and the wider public.
MH 2019