Jia Sung, Li Qingzhao: Xun Xun Mi Mi = Li Qingzhao: Searching/Seeking.
Watson Library’s collection of zines continues to grow, and we’ve added over fifty new zines since our last post on the subject. Here, we’re featuring zines we’ve acquired within the last year with an international focus, and highlighting several international publishers committed to publishing works by independent artists within their communities.
Maamoul Press was co-founded by Palestinian author and artist Leila Abdelrazaq and Lebanese designer, artist, and printmaker Aya Krisht. The name Maamoul comes from the traditional Arab pastry Maa’moul (معمول), which typically has a date or nut filling with an ornamental design pressed onto the surface. The root of the word, ‘amal ( عمل), means to work or to make.
Maamoul Press is a multi-disciplinary small press and collective for the creation, curation, and dissemination of art at the intersection of comics, printmaking, and book arts. The press aims to elevate work from a diverse range of creators from marginalized backgrounds and to position the work of diasporic artists alongside the work of artists living in their home countries. They recently published It’s Not Nice for a Girl by Christina Atik, a graphic designer and illustrator based in Lebanon. Atik says It’s Not Nice for a Girl is inspired by “conversations that almost every woman hears from family and society dictating how she needs to live, look, and act in order to be a ‘proper girl.’”
Water With Water (W/W/W) is an experimental publishing project and visual research lab started by Nathan Ross Davis in 2015 with the help of Sarah Elawad. They are based primarily in Doha and New York City, and they specialize in an international mix of dynamic books, ephemera, merchandise, and apparel. The name Water With Water comes from the Arabic saying “فسّر الماء بالماء” which translates to “explain water with water” and is often used to describe when someone is talking in circles. They explain, “For us, it is recursive, something with itself, and self-explanatory.”
In 2020, W/W/W began publishing The Gulf Between Us, an open-call photography zine that features visuals originating in the Gulf. Sherifa Eletrebi curated and designed this recently published fourth volume, which features collages of images from artists and photographers from Qatar and beyond.
Kootchy Editions is the editorial project of Tahiti-based artist Margaux Birgou. The word “Kootchy” comes from a warrior scream of joy in New Caledonia, where Birgou is originally from. The press focuses on alternative ways of bookmaking and collaborates with local artists.
Motu Ho’e: Quitter la Carte Postale is the first installment of Bigou’s Motu series (Motu are small islands in the lagoon in Reo Tahiti), a risograph-printed zine series which she describes as “an archipelago of books about French Polynesia.” Designed by Bigou during her stay at the Transat artist residency in Tahiti, the zine showcases fourteen artists from French Polynesia, all created around the common theme “leaving the postcard.”
The fourteen artists featured are: Claire Goudeau, Céline Yau, Ennio Neagle, Pauline Martin, Oreus, Guillaume Machenaud, Julia Bernut, Yiling Changues, Tahe, Teva Paoli, Maanu Rambaud, KNKY, Omise, and Margaux Bigou.
Paintings & More is a solo offering from Margaux Birgou, this time a collection of her painted works from 2020–2022. The zine is folded accordion style format and is a four-color risograph print featuring fluorescent pink, teal, aqua, and yellow. The vivid colors and offset printing make for an almost hallucinogenic experience, fitting given the artist's affinity for myth, magic, and indigenous wildlife of the South Pacific.
The orlando collective is a queer-feminist collective based in Frankfurt am Main. From March through June 2020, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, the collective gathered online to read out loud to each other and exchange ideas. To honor this time together, the collective created the zine Sheee whoooooo, a “fragmentary collection of texts and references gathered during our online readings in 2020. Oral communication is ephemeral, only occasional snippets and comments were shared in the chat and fixed within this zine. It is an excerpt from a larger conversation, which hopefully will continue and continue.”
Multidisciplinary artist Jia Sung was born in Minnesota, raised in Singapore, and now lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work often references Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, applying their insights to examine the themes of femininity, queerness, and otherness—sometimes invoking the Chinese zhiguiai tradition, a genre of writing that features “accounts of the strange.”
Written in both Chinese and English, “Searching/Seeking” is Jia Sung’s translation of the Song Dynasty female poet Li Qingzhao’s poem, “Xun Xun Mi Mi.” In the wake of her husband’s death, Li wrote of great loss and melancholy, motifs that resonated strongly with Sung “in the context of pandemic and the radical shifts and losses we have faced in our communities.” The zine is in poetry comic format, risograph-printed, and staple-bound.