Spring Reading List – Team's Pick

We believe that reading is not a solitary act, but a shared dialogue. As spring unfolds, our team has pulled a few titles from our library shelves to share with you. Ranging from the decades-long archival journey of the Long March Project to an intimate collection of poetry on diasporic experience, the selection reflects the ideas and perspectives that inspire us and inform the work we do.

Carrier Bag Fiction
Published by Spector Books, 2021

Bringing together essays, interviews, design and photography, Carrier Bag Fiction is a celebration and expansion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Rather than revisiting the essay as a singular text, the publication assembles a set of responses that collectively reframe how stories, and by extension, technologies and worlds, might be held and told.  In a present marked by instability, violence and fracture, I feel the urge to return to these writings, to what Dorothee Elmiger writes in the ‘logic of AND’, and to remember that ‘not one thing leaves the bag as a victor, as the winner.’

Recommendation by Jeremy Chen, Digital and Communications Coordinator

Dictee
Published by University of California Press, 1982

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha renders the instability of Korean identity through form and syntax so fractured it verges on incomprehensibility at times. Yet, its emotional urgency is palpable throughout. As elusive as it is intimate, Cha’s narrative intersperses autobiographical vignettes with tales of saints, goddesses and political revolutionaries across multilingual fragments, uncaptioned photographs and filmic jump-cuts. Violence sits unbearably near to tenderness; language serves as much to obfuscate as to clarify, with meaning flickering in and out of reach. Splintering into Korean, French, English and Japanese, Dictee orchestrates a linguistic disorientation that performs the author’s own displacement and grief.

Recommendation by Danni Cheng, Operations and Programmes Coordinator

How to Wash a Heart
Published by Pavilion Poetry, 2020

How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil is a collection of poetry, a small, green book to be held in your hand on warm days while pollen fuses in the air. With an honest, visceral, and rigorous voice, it tears apart and interrogates hospitality within a borrowed bedroom, a smiling face, and a long-lost motherland. Kapil writes about the nuanced and subtle violence ubiquitous in the everyday being of diaspora living in India, England, and America, while holding close the fragility, softness, and resistance that bind us closer and, hopefully, stronger.

Recommendation by Jiaying Kou, Publications and Programmes Lead

Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear
Published by Silver Press, 2024

Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear gathers a wide-ranging constellation of voices to consider how sound moves through bodies, histories, and structures of feeling. Refusing clean separation between aesthetics and politics, it treats listening as embodied, relational, and insurgent. Shifting across intimate and collective registers, the volume frames feminism as a way of hearing otherwise: attuned to difference, interdependence, and the uneven conditions under which sound is heard, resulting in a resonant cacophony of essays and scores that lingers long after reading.

Recommendation by Jessica Kwok, Head of Programmes and Curatorial

Long March Project 1999–
Published by Long March Project, 2025

The Long March Project 1999– unfolds as an extended curatorial enquiry into how artistic, social, and historical narratives are carried across time and space. Structured through exhibitions, research initiatives, and site-responsive actions, it operates as a collective process. Its recent, expansive publication brings into view the scale and ambition of this undertaking, assembling materials developed and gathered over decades. It offers a way to think with a practice that accumulates meaning through sustained engagement.

Recommendation by Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Director

Seed of Memory, Ancestral Recipes
Published by 51 Personae, 2024

Seed of Memory includes a collection of ancestral recipes gathered and reenacted by the Weaving Realities Collective since 2017. In this publication, forgotten or erased voices and stories are re-acted through the retelling of ancestral recipes, opening a space for learning diverse types of Earth knowledges. Seed of Memory heals our relations to food, the motherland, and others through the invitations and gestures of cooking and eating together.

Recommendation by Jess Meyer, Head of Operations