Ho Tam, founder of Vancouver’s Hotam Press and artist-in-residence at the Chinese Culture Center’s 41 Ross gallery since September 20, has turned the space into a bookstore, gallery, and studio for his time there through the end of November.
On Saturday, November 9, Tam, along with 10 other presses set up tables in the alley for the first-ever Chinatown Ross Alley Zine Festival.
Tam started making books as a kid and started his own independent press about 12 years ago. With a book or a zine, you can express a complete idea, he says. As an example, he talked about his The Yellow Pages.
“It’s a book that investigate sort of racial stereotypes and culture and things like that from A to Z. It’s like an alphabet book, with text and images together,” he said. “I think in a painting, it would be difficult to have that narrative.”
The Yellow Pages is inside the gallery along with other books of Tam’s including The Greatest Story Ever Told, a collection of stories written in the style of fables, and Fine China, showing porcelain objects printed with images such as Hello Kitty and Chairman Mao.
Kamryn You-Mak, who lives in the Marina and leads environmental education programs for National Parks, was in the gallery, paging through Fine China. Her mother, who grew up in Chinatown, told her about the zine festival.
“It’s the inaugural event, so I wanted to check it out and see who was in attendance and what kind of materials and artwork was being shown,” she said. “The exhibit in here has been really cool, and I’m looking at the book now.”
Paul Bothwell was also looking around the studio. He came to the festival with his mother, Cathy Bothwell. Their father and grandfather (respectively) lived on Ross Alley when he first immigrated from China, so it’s a place familiar to both. Paul, a photographer and videographer, says he likes zines, particularly Mixed Rice.
“It’s created by an East Bay queer community that highlights multiracial Asians in the Bay Area,” he said. “I think independent publications can be a more organic expression because there isn’t a sort of gatekeeper telling you that you can or cannot say something.”
Tam invited Bay Area artists and publishers that he had met at other festivals to this one, including Unity Press (who currently have work on display in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts’ sports-oriented Get in the Game exhibition) and Sming Sming Books.
Down the alley a little, Vivian Sming, who started the publishing studio in 2017, stood behind a table displaying copies of books she has published, including Brown Eyes on Russell Street by Berkeley artist Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán and Blood, Sweat, and Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell, edited by Luke Williams.
Sming continues to be surprised by the possibilities of the book form.
“Most people in the world know what a book is and know how to be in relationship to a book,” she said. “It’s something that I think, in terms of making art accessible, is a form that is actually pretty brilliant.”
Sming, who knows Tam from the Vancouver Art Book Fair, she was glad to join him and others in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
“It’s really wonderful to see him here at 41 Ross, and it’s exciting because I think a lot of people are here who maybe aren’t familiar with what an art book is, or a zine. They’re here to pick up some fortune cookies [Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory is on Ross], which is great. Chinatown is filled with vendors, right? It’s like we’re all here to do our grocery shopping or take a look at these shops here, and this feels very much a part of that, so it feels very special.”
Like You-Mak, Raymon Scutedjo-The, a product design manager, wanted to attend Chinatown’s first zine festival, so he came over from Oakland. Having just started his stroll along the alley, he said he was looking forward to what he would find and glad to see so many people out. He likes the niche aspect of zines.
“You make zines on a very specific topic, so sometimes it’s super interesting,” he said. “Other times it’s just not my cup of tea. And that’s OK.”
Yoran Yang, who goes by Yo, was standing by a table with postcards and some small books and zines from Everything Matters Press. Yang, who is getting a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University, describes himself as the words person and his best friend and partner in the press, Will Mairs, as the “beautifying person.”
Yang points to a couple small books on the table that he wrote, one about mourning and one of essays about the Chinese democracy movement in the 1980s and ’90s.
“We like to say that our stuff gets divided into void shit and trivialities,” he said. “These are the void shit.”
Under trivialities, there is a neighborhood newsletter with submissions of things like missed connections, a project playing with something called vowel drifting (I never heard of it) in the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, and a folio of images, A Different Moon, by collage artist and poet Sarah Mikula.
Yang has lots of experience with these festivals. But this one is special, he says.
“A lot of my stuff is rooted in Asian culture and my heritage, so it’s a pretty cool opportunity to do a zine fest in an Asian community,” he said. “We do book fairs and zine fests all the time. But this is unique in that we have an audience that might get some of this stuff a little bit more directly.”
Down the alley right next to the line for the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie, Webster Quoc Nguyen, a member of art collective Inky Fingers Printshop, agrees.
“I love Chinatown, and I love the community that’s fostered here. Hotam Press is amazing, and what they do is super cool,” he said. “The cultural gathering that’s here is such a wonderful mix of cultural roots and tradition, as well as a lot of new folks coming into the space, emphasizing visual arts and community, and it’s always wonderful to see that.”
Hotam Press will be in residency at 41 Ross through November 30. More information here.
