Published by Dreamerfty

A looking glass is a mirror. After Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871, the term "looking glass" came to mean “the opposite of normal or uncanny".

The title of this book, Glass-Looking, is an invented word based on the structure of “bird-watching”, emphasizing the act of observation with glass as the subject. Glasses in this book are taken from IKEA product photos and are presented at the original dimensions as stated in the product listing. Ke Xu and Yue Zhou, as observers, retrospectively observe the triple translations between the actual glass, the product photo and the image in the book. In this process, paper carries the container function of the glass, and the transparent property of the glass penetrates the pages. A visual game flows between two and three dimensions, realised by flipping the pages.

This is not a catalogue about glasses, it is more about seeing and cognition, and the implied lacuna in between, this subtle shift of focus to cognitive bias echoes "the opposite of normal or uncanny" view that can be found through the "looking glass".

40pp
100 x 265 mm
Paperback, clipbound
English, Simplified Chinese
2022