prep-room OPEN | Book Uncovered (with Tan Li-Jen)

This programme prioritises NUS students and faculty. To verify your status as an NUS student/faculty, please register using your NUS email account. Interested members of the public may register but will be placed on a waitlist – we will contact you when a slot opens up.​

22 June, 2-4PM​

This workshop with Tan Li-Jen invites participants to reacquaint themselves with the book and see it anew through the visual lens of book covers. Drawing on a selection of book covers and books from a library’s collection, the first part of the workshop will make a quick foray into book history, explore the materiality of books, while examining book cover design as exercises in visual storytelling. The second part of the workshop will transition to an activity inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style in which a story is retold 99 times in different styles. Participants will be invited to create variations of the same subject using textual and visual elements, and in the process, explore the possibilities of language and communication styles.​

This programme is part of the prep-room OPEN upcoming at the NX3 Gallery. The prep-room OPEN brings together ongoing projects worked on by researchers and faculty based in the NUS campus. Interests and investigations recall iconographic studies of Southeast Asia icons and idols, thinking through resources in libraries and museums and ecologies of loss in indigenous architecture.

Please note that the workshop invites its guests to sustain a degree of participation and commitment to the possible materialisation into a prep-room display opening within the year. By attending this program, we consider that you are interested in participating in the workshop and prep-room activities.

More information about books and book covers​

The book’s mutability and durability has seen it take different material forms before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press which has allowed it to evolve into the book as we know it today. While the demand for books is still largely dictated by the clout of an author and its content, book covers can sometimes facilitate the serendipitous discovery of books. Book cover design has become a big component in the modern book production and book consumption, and it can be more than a peritextual accoutrement: designing a book cover is an exercise in visual storytelling to potential readers the ideas articulated in printed word. ​

Host or Publisher NUS Museum