| about illuminator studio |

illuminator studio was loosely formed in May 2015 in Zhuhai, China, by two high-school friends as a blogging space where we posted everything we liked. There was not much consistency in neither the content nor the frequency of posting. As we live and work in different countries, China and the United States, it is not easy for the team to communicate. Therefore, adapted and adopted, we have made some changes: running the blog and the studio separately.

Now the studio is 100% alive again on the other side of the earth.

Space is where all the experiments and artistic collaboration happen. Small sections of a book in planning, sketches of an idea, fragments of a dream will be presented online for the viewers to fully witness the growth of a project and even participate in it. It is a fully open space for thoughts to ferment. This “space” residency does not have a time frame as time is relative in the cosmos. The residency invites one artist or an artist group to take over the home page every time to present their project. 

I learned about artist’s books in 2016, and it has been my primary practice ever since. With layers of text and ways of binding, books wonder between two- and three-dimensional space. Readers can experience both the materialities and visualities of the books. The studio collaborates with artists/designers to produce all kinds of books in unconventional materials and explore different binding methods. Also, the studio helps all creative individuals to manifest their works in the form of books.

As a result of bookmaking, I have accumulated a fair amount of paper scraps of all sorts. To recycle them, I separate them into different colors and paper types and make new paper out of these recycled materials. Also, all the paper waste from our studio/home is now fully recycled. Most of these recycled papers are made into new pieces of paper, paper pins, notecards, and other paper goods. A small amount of the recycled papers are made into the covers for our 100% recyclable and handmade journals.