THE UTOPIAN ENCLAVE — ARTIST_BOOK

This publication gathers Bai’s photographs, symbolic images, and artificial landscapes on loose sheets of different sizes and proportions, all housed within a single case. Fixed binding is removed so that each sheet becomes an independent module that can be taken out, moved, overlapped, and recombined.

The work was made for an independent book fair in Japan. For Bai, the loose-sheet format was not primarily a special book-design gesture; it brought the modular method he was repeatedly using at the time directly into the structure of reading. The artist no longer fixes a single page order, and the reader’s actions physically alter the adjacency of images.

It shares an interest in artificial landscape, symbols, and assembly with the 2017 suspended installation of the same title, but it is neither a catalogue nor a preliminary study. One version places modules in the reader’s hands to be rearranged, while the other suspends artificial landscapes and symbolic structures above the viewer, carrying a related method into another scale.