Sming Sming Books is the publishing studio of Bay Area-based artist Vivian Sming, experimenting with books as art, discourse, exhibition, and archive. Formed in 2017, the studio designs and publishes a wide range of artists’ books, zines, and editions in close collaboration with artists whose works and ideas inform design, material, and printing choices. Sming Sming Books is invested in creating books from practices that are challenging to represent on paper and is committed to promoting critical discourse and advancing cultural equity through the format of publishing.
For ICA LA’s Bookshelf Residency, Sming Sming Books celebrates ten years of publishing, featuring over 70 books of all shapes, sizes, themes and topics, including out of print, newly released, and current titles. Sming Sming’s catalogue includes monographs by Saif Azzuz, Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán, Pratibha Parmar, and Lava Thomas; paperbacks of genre-expansive texts by Al-An deSouza, Johanna Hedva, Michael Ned Holte, and Vanessa Holyoak; vinyl and cassette tapes by Sholeh Asgary and Jimena Sarno; chapbooks and artist’s books by Indira Allegra, Helen Shewolfe Tseng, and Linda Zeb Hang; card decks and multi-packs by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Patrick Michael Ballard, and Heesoo Kwon; and much more.
Presented in conjunction with ICA LA’s Bookshelf Residency, the Annex Gallery features the exhibition LONG LIVE BOOKS!, a salon-style installation of papercuts by artist Kate Laster who transcribes excerpts of Sming’s essay of the same name into a series of paper works. Written from Sming’s home in Silicon Valley where she makes books in her garage, the essay traces the region’s endless pursuit of the “next new thing” and argues that the book, the “ancient technology” that Amazon’s early business was built on and nearly destroyed, endures through collective willpower. Laster gives that argument a physical form: working by hand in woodcut and papercut, she draws on the punk legacy of quick graffiti stencils and on the papel picado and Chinese papercut traditions prevalent in the Bay Area to make unorthodox bookforms. Her cut line gives Sming’s words the urgency of a stencil on a wall. Together, the texts and papercuts invite audiences to consider reading, writing, lending, and buying books as small acts of resistance against algorithmic control of what we read, while celebrating the publishers and bookstores sustaining the culture of print.
As part of the Bookshelf Residency, ICA LA will present programs that include a book launch of Johanna Hedva’s new book My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire and an afternoon on abolition and performance with Anna Martine Whitehead, Suchi Branfman, and the Dancing Through Prison Walls community.
