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The Kitchen Is A Place is a solo exhibition by artist Ann Yan (闫安), held at SxS Gallery, Shanghai. The exhibition was curated by Zhang Yehong (张业鸿). Graphic design by Xiaoyuan Gao, using Elliott’s Blue Eyeshadow and Yink for headlines; the secondary type is a combination of Metallophile Sp8, Resource Han Rounded and the ornaments found in Looking Flowers Deco. Latin alphabet elements in the body copy are set in NotCourierSans.

From SxS Gallery (auto-translated from the Chinese):

For artist Ann Yan, growing up near the Freud Museum in North West London inspired her interest in psychoanalysis and the human mind, especially the subconscious mind, which is deeply embedded in the universal human experience. As a second-generation immigrant, Ann Yan has consciously looked back and tapped into her own cultural collective memory. Citing images from numerous 80s cookbooks, she focuses on recipes that are full of East Asian flavor and flips this nostalgia into a personal and surreal narrative style.

If Dali's grotesque imagery in Carla’s Dinner Party is to be seen as opening a new path for the tradition of table still life painting, Ann Yan has undoubtedly inherited this aesthetic, combining imagery and depictions of food with her own reflections on post-colonialism and cultural relativism through the combined mediums of oil paintings, sculpture, and collage.

Official poster

Exhibition title and introduction displayed on the wall

Exhibition leaflet (back, A4)

Exhibition leaflet (A4)

Close-up: exhibition leaflet (A4)

Folded: exhibition leafLet (A4)

Typographic base

Poster (square)

天空签名 Sky-Writing is a solo exhibition by artist 张业鸿 Zhang Yehong. It was shown at 拟像空间 Simulacra in Beijing, China, in 2021. From the gallery’s website:

The exhibition revolves around a now-defunct commercial tool – “sky-writing” – in which the artist starts with an anonymous sky-writing enthusiast starting with a chance flight pattern left by an anonymous sky-writer, the artist navigates through a multitude of found texts and images, searching for echoes of the different frequencies left by technology on the timeline.

The smoke screen of the First World War inspired a British Air Force major to take business to the skies and in 1922 issued the first introduction to sky-writing – ‘HELLO’; PepsiCo employed a large fleet of propaganda aircraft in the 1830s and 1850s to The Germans saw writing in the air as another means of circumventing the Treaty of Versailles, secretly training air force pilots through squadrons of commercial advertising; the Chilean writer Bolaño depicted in Distant Stars a mysterious puzzling skywriter who is both a murderer and a poet ......

The political and the mundane, the fictional and the real, the war machine and the performance apparatus, are intertwined like a Borromean knot, weaving a polyphonic historical situation; in the spiral of the narrative, it eventually comes back to the traumatic dimension behind the poetic image of the sky-writing.

The exhibition was directed by 赵邦 Zhao Bang. Space design by 张镜澜 Minato 林鹭琪 Lin Luqi. Xiaoyuan Gao provided the graphic design and the custom type design. The main font in use is Jack Halten Fahnestock’s Tiny (Velvetyne Type Foundry). The Chinese title is custom type based on Tiny, drawn by Xiaoyuan Gao. Additional fonts include Gao’s own Barbecue (old version, notyourtype) and Resource Han Rounded by Cyano Hao.

Poster

Leaflet

Leaflet

Title of the exhibition

Folded leaflet

Poster

Custom type design