Projects
Shop
In June 2017, I kidnapped an encyclopedia from the Public Library of Shanghai. It was an illustrated compendium about Chinese aesthetic tradition, in which no aspect of popular arts was left undocumented: theater, dance and opera, landscape, architecture and furniture, hairstyling and clothing, toys or packaging design.
We are able to understand the world once we can name and represent our experience in it. Despite not being able to read the text of the book, it was possible for me to navigate through the pages thanks to its images, which I copied by hand on colourful papers as if it were a study exercise. The result is an archive of 555 drawings, an attempt to insert in my imagination the history of a culture so distant from my own one.
> 2017-19, 555 drawings, ball pen on paper, 6 x 10 cm
© Edén Barrena, 2025