51 Personae

51 Personae is an independent experimental publishing and art project based in Shanghai, China. Our practice moves across and beyond conventional categories of publishing, art, and book production, working with artist books, zines, independent comics, printmaking, and documentary-based publications. We understand publishing as a social and artistic practice that is both material and relational, rather than a fixed genre or format. The project originated in 2016–2017 as part of a socially engaged art initiative developed during the 11th Shanghai Biennale, with an initial focus on urban working-class communities and everyday life in the city. Since 2018, we have developed an independent publishing practice that deliberately crosses the boundaries between contemporary art and publishing, using books as a form of fieldwork, documentation, and distribution. Since 2023, we have increasingly published multilingual editions and expanded collaborations with printmakers and independent artists across Asia. These collaborations allow us to develop low-cost, accessible, and reproducible forms of publishing, while maintaining a strong emphasis on autonomy and affordability. We distribute our publications through direct circulation, including participation in international art book fairs and zine festivals, where the booth itself functions as a site of exchange, encounter, and informal exhibition. Through this ongoing practice, 51 Personae seeks to construct a trans-local network of readers, artists, and collaborators, situating publishing as a mode of collective inquiry into social realities, marginal histories, and lived experiences across Asia and the Global South.

At the fair, we plan to present a selection of recent and forthcoming independent publications developed by 51 Personae, alongside collaborative projects with artists and writers across Asia and Europe. Our table will include both published works and new or recently released titles. **Published / recently released works:** * *Kalashnikov* — Yi Hu (2025) Format: independent comic Size: 165 x 220 mm Edition: small offset edition Previously presented at multiple international art book fairs and zine festivals. * *Ahead Beheaded* — edited by TkTk (2026) Format: documentary zine combining printmaking, hand-drawn comics, and text Size: A5 Edition: small offset / independent edition First presented in 2026. * *Our Daily Lives Have to Be a Satisfaction in Themselves* — Miriam, Emily Larned, Noel Furie (2026) Format: artist book / documentary publication Size: 165 x 220 mm Edition: small offset edition To be published in June 2026 * *Sound of Shanghai* — Vyn Lee (2026) Format: illustrated photo-zine / essay publication Size: pocket size Edition: small offset edition To be published in July 2026 * *Between Animals* — May Frazen (forthcoming July 2026) Format: independent graphic novel Size: A5 Edition: small offset edition Status: new release; limited or first presentation depending on fair timing. Songs of Silent Valley — 51 Personae (forthcoming August 2026) Format: artist book / documentary publication Size: A5 (planned) Edition: in production Status: new publication; first public presentation planned at selected fairs. Across these publications, we prioritize low-cost offset printing, portable formats, and fair distribution through direct circulation at book fairs. Many of the works are developed through long-term collaborations and are designed to circulate as both reading material and informal exhibition objects.

For 51 Personae, making a physical book is not simply a choice of medium, but a way of insisting on a form of durability for lived experience, especially those experiences that are often marginal, unstable, or easily erased. In an era where publishing can be instantaneous, editable, and endlessly circulated in digital space, we continue to return to the book as a material object because it holds a different kind of permanence—one that resists the speed and volatility of online circulation. We understand paper and the book form as an ultimate form of medium: a structure capable of storing human experience and thought in a way that cannot be easily overwritten or deleted. This is particularly important when working with the stories of ordinary people, working-class lives, and communities positioned outside dominant cultural visibility. To make a book is not only to translate these experiences into visual or textual form, but also to construct an archive that has physical weight, presence, and endurance. Our process deliberately engages with slowness, effort, and what might appear as inefficiency. This includes the time of editing, sequencing, printing, binding, and physically transporting books across borders and contexts. We consider these material and logistical constraints not as obstacles, but as part of the meaning of the work itself. The difficulty of circulation becomes a form of care and commitment—each book carries with it the effort required to bring it into another space and into another hand. Emotionally, this process is often grounded in attention and responsibility: attention to how fragments of lived experience are arranged and held together, and responsibility toward the people and narratives that enter the publication. The physicality of the book allows us to think not only about representation, but about custody—how knowledge and memory are held, transmitted, and protected over time. To make a book waza waza—on purpose, with care—is to refuse the idea that efficiency should determine value. Instead, it is to affirm that the act of making, assembling, and carrying a book can itself be a form of ethical and aesthetic practice. In this sense, the book is not only an object for reading, but also a temporary gathering place where different lives, geographies, and temporalities are held together with intention.

Since 2023, due to increasing difficulties in the circulation and exchange of Chinese-language publications within mainland China (as a result of state regulation), we have begun to publish our books more intentionally in multilingual editions, including Japanese translations. This decision comes from a recognition that books should not be confined within a single linguistic or cultural boundary. However, the mainstream publishing world still often operates within national and linguistic frameworks, implicitly assuming that books are primarily meant for domestic readers. This significantly limits the potential of publishing as a transregional and cross-cultural form of communication. For us, bringing our work to Iga is part of this broader effort to reimagine circulation beyond dominant cultural centers. We place particular importance on participating in book fairs outside major metropolitan hubs. Our project itself originated from a site-specific artistic practice in a working-class community in Shanghai, and this early experience continues to shape how we understand where books should go and whom they should reach. We believe that non-metropolitan spaces—places that are not typically considered central nodes of cultural production—can open up different conditions of encounter. In such contexts, communication is less mediated by institutional visibility and more grounded in direct exchange. Many of our publications focus on small places, everyday lives, and marginalized communities; bringing these books into similarly non-central locations creates a resonance between content and context. Ultimately, we hope that in a place like Iga, books and readers can activate each other in a more immediate and unexpected way. This is the most important possibility we are seeking: not circulation defined by scale or visibility, but by proximity, attention, and mutual encounter.