The Time We Share

2023
offset lithograph, sewn in sections and adhesive bound
152 x 214 mm, 344 pp

The Time We Share documents the twenty-year career of the performing-arts curator/promoter Kim Seonghee with a collection of writings by her and her colleagues pubished in various publications as well as fresh contributions. The title, a quotation from Frie Leysen, indicates a definition of contemporary arts based on shared temporality rather than – often Euro-centric – geography. The cover takes this view and developes an argument by showing the world time zone map, which suggests that even time is not universal and often warped by political and administrative forces.

The typography nods at the idea that people from different corners of the earth, not only the West, equally participate in shaping the history. We adopted the square-unit grid composition system, which had historically been a norm in Korea before the country was westernized (it is still used in an adapted form in China and Japan). Thus, all the Korean characters and word spaces occupy the em width – the same as the type size – or, in the case of the Latin characters and punctuations, half the em width. The resulting pages are rough, strange, wrong – look at the “rivers” running vertically accross the lines! – and, in our view, quite beautiful.