Artists’ Books from JMU Libraries Featured in a Madison Art Collection Exhibition
Posted October 28, 2026 in Exhibits, JMU Libraries News, Special Collections News
Three artists’ books from JMU Libraries are featured in the latest Madison Art Collection (MAC) exhibition, 传/Chuán: Dialogues with Chinese Cultural Heritage.
What are artists’ books?
JMU Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Distinctive Collections (DSDC) department manages a diverse collection of these works — partly in support of the JMU Book Arts Minor — and partnered with the MAC and the School of Art, Design, and Art History (SADAH) to loan three items for the show.
As pieces of art realized in the form of a book, artists’ books are contemporary phenomena that range from one-of-a-kind handmade creations to commercially produced pieces. Exhibition curator Feixue Mei (Assistant Professor of Graphic Design) explains that artists’ books function as “both an object and a system for organizing experience,” with their physical form shaping their meaning.
Curator Feixue Mei shares her perspective on selecting these three works and the stories they tell:
“One of the central ideas behind 传/Chuán is that cultural heritage is continuously shaped by the ways people encounter, interpret, and pass it forward. These three publications explore that process through different approaches to visual storytelling, materiality, and bookmaking.
In China: Chung-kuo, graphic designer Tomoko Miho brings together photography, typography, sequencing, and the material qualities of commercial printing to construct a visual interpretation of China. It demonstrates how graphic design can shape our understanding of a place through editorial and material decisions.
Ai Weiwei’s Beijing 10/2003 approaches cultural documentation from a different perspective. Through hundreds of still images drawn from an extensive video recording of Beijing’s streets, the book captures the everyday urban environment during a period of rapid transformation. It invites us to consider how cultural memory is embedded in everyday environments and experiences, including those that change or disappear over time.
Monica Ong’s The Star Gazer: Planisphere Poetry offers another approach by transforming historical Chinese astronomical knowledge into an interactive poetic experience. Ong combines visual design, poetry, Chinese and English text, and a rotating paper mechanism that invites readers to physically engage with the work. I find this especially meaningful because the act of reading becomes part of the experience of transmitting and interpreting knowledge.
Together, these three works represent different approaches to publishing and operate at different scales: Miho offers a visual interpretation of a country, Ai Weiwei documents the changing landscape of a city, and Ong reimagines a historical understanding of the cosmos. Across these perspectives, the books demonstrate how cultural knowledge can be constructed, recorded, and transformed.”
Why does this collaboration matter?
“Chuán means ‘to transmit,’ and that’s exactly what this collaboration does — bringing materials from DSDC into conversation with objects from the MAC,” says Ginny Soenksen, Director of the Madison Art Collection and Lisanby Museum.
Mei adds, “By placing these artists’ books in conversation with other objects in the exhibition, I invite visitors to consider cultural heritage as something that continues to generate new meanings through artistic and design practices.”
Caitlin Birch, Director of DSDC, echoes these sentiments: “Collaboration is at the heart of DSDC’s work. By partnering with the MAC and SADAH, we’re introducing our collections to new audiences and new interpretations. At the same time, we’re rediscovering them ourselves by looking at them in new ways. Collaborations like 传/Chuán have a cascading effect, influencing how DSDC uses and interprets these collections in the reading room, the classroom, and beyond.”
As Soenksen notes, libraries and museums share a core commitment to “holding materials in trust so that people can learn from them, both now and years into the future. This collaboration shows what’s possible when JMU’s library and museum work together: richer exhibitions, deeper research, and more ways for people to learn from the collections across the university.”
Visit the exhibition: Stop by 131 W. Grace Street to enjoy the exhibition before it closes on December 4.
Learn more about artists’ books on our website or by contacting dsdc@jmu.edu.