These remarkable photographs of Hong Kong history, taken by a home-grown camera, make up Wong’s new book, Diana Hong Kong 2014.

The book is a prime example of the distinctive publications that will be sold at Booked: Hong Kong Art Book Fair, which is returning for its fifth edition from April 28 to May 1 at Tai Kwun, in Central.

Featuring 96 exhibitors, the fair highlights publishing as an artistic practice, giving visitors the opportunity to thumb through and buy books that range from the unconventional to the arcane.

Many of the books, magazines and zines at the event are limited editions not available at commercial bookstores.

Where the hip and humble rub shoulders in arty Gwangju, South Korea

“We have a range that [includes] indie, to more photographers, to people getting grants, and to slightly higher-end,” says Daniel Szehin Ho, project director of the fair.

Ho adds that the line-up of exhibitors also includes those more focused on art writing, such as the Hong Kong-based literary bimonthly Spicy Fish, and local bookstores Echo Books and Mount Zero Books.

“We want to definitely support the Hong Kong community, and serve as a platform. But also, we definitely want to bring in other people, other exhibitors from around the world.”

Among the non-local exhibitors is Reading Room, which is also one of the 28 first-time exhibitors at this year’s fair. Founded in 2019, the Guangzhou-based collective is bringing a selection of books from artists based in mainland China and across Southeast Asia.

One book to be sold is Of the Land: Home Recipe, a collection of family recipes from places including India, Taiwan and Cambodia. Created in collaboration with another Guangzhou art collective, Boloho, the book highlights recipes with specific cultural and historical contexts, such as those featuring snails, a popular ingredient among indigenous Taiwanese tribes.

Reading Room will also be presenting a book it developed for Documenta 15, a major contemporary art exhibition held in 2022 in Kassel, Germany.

Published ahead of the exhibition, the book provided guidelines on how art organisations at Documenta 15 were to present works based on the concept of lumbung – the Indonesian term for rice barns, wherein crops from the community are stored as part of a shared common resource.

Two of Reading Room’s co-founders, Li Xiaotan and Xie Siyan, will be part of a panel discussing the collective’s work on April 29, from 12.30pm to 2pm.

International exhibitors showing at the fair include Printed Matter, a New York-based non-profit organisation known for promoting publications by artists.

The non-profit, returning to Hong Kong after the Covid-19 pandemic saw it skip the fair in 2020 and 2021, was largely responsible for the formulation of the art book fair model that emerged during the 1960s.

Also part of Booked this year is the newly launched project “Sounds Like Print”, curated by Tai Kwun’s associate curator Ingrid Chu and art researcher Edward Sanderson, which will run beyond the fair until November. Situated within Tai Kwun’s Artists’ Book Library, the project includes works that highlight the interplay between sound and print.

“With books, things are made in many copies – they’re not unique,” Ho says. “You can touch it, and it can circulate. When you think about books and printed matter in that way, there is actually some similarities with sound. [Both are] forms of art that … can be reproduced, that can circulate. This was the initial impulse.”

As part of the project, on May 1 local artist Samson Young will host a “durational performance” in which two pianists play music that has been modified by a computer algorithm, which will bring to life a new installation of his that will be unveiled earlier in the fair.

Other special displays include Dear Franklin, by local artist Kurt Tong, who has taken found photographs of old Shanghai and re-contextualised them through a series of letters; and works by Italian artist Raffaella della Olga – who creates patterns and works using a typewriter – courtesy of Paris-based publisher Three Star Books.

Wong notes that over the years, the Hong Kong Art Book Fair has become an established event on the city’s cultural calendar.

“You know how Art Basel comes back every year – it’s similar. Of course, the art book fair is more local,” he says.

“The number of people coming has increased. One year, it was during the pandemic, you’d expect less people to come, but actually a lot of people came.

“It’s become an event that people look forward to, and I think people have become much more interested in photography books and artists’ books.”

“Booked: Hong Kong Art Book Fair”, Galleries and Artists’ Book Library, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central. April 28 3pm-7pm, April 29-May 1 12pm-7pm. Regular tickets are HK$40.