Kkamanke

Kkamanke, a small publisher founded by artist Hwang Eun-Young in Seoul in 2015, focuses on artists' books that incorporate images, text, sound, and humor, without taking themselves too seriously. Kkamanke sometimes partners with other artists but mainly publishes Hwang Eun-Young's works as part of her artistic practice.
After the first book "A Black Dog Who Barked Twice" with artist Bak Jin-hong, Eun-Young created about fifteen books and zines including a collaboration with Knust Press for two books, one in 2015 and another in 2023.
She has recently been creating small, concept-driven artists’ books and multiples.

Hwang Eunyoung, Line/Rectangle, Copublished Kkamanke and Knust Press, 2023 © Hwang Eunyoung

《Line/Rectangle》 was first published in Korea in 2022. Later, it was reprinted in Riso at Knust Press. This time, Hwang Eun-Young collaborated with Jan Dirk de Wilde, the founder of Knust Press, on the binding he designed for his book WIG, which turned out great.

In this book, Hwang Eun-Young has fun exploring the colors, shapes, and lines of wood in the pictures. She also looks at the relationship between the different materials used, such as wood, paper, and ink. This means that there are real and drawn materials in the book, and they are connected.

Along with the book launch, there was an exhibition at Extrapool in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, showcasing wooden objects, interventions of wood structures(some of which are inspired by Jan Dirk’s binding structure), papers, and books created by Hwang Eun-Young over several months.

In this book, Hwang Eun-Young has fun exploring the colors, shapes, and lines of wood in the pictures. She also looks at the relationship between the different materials used, such as wood, paper, and ink. This means that there are real and drawn materials in the book, and they are connected.

Along with the book launch, there was an exhibition at Extrapool in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, showcasing wooden objects, interventions of wood structures(some of which are inspired by Jan Dirk’s binding structure), papers, and books created by Hwang Eun-Young over several months.

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Hwang Eunyoung, 22cm, Kkamanke, 2022 © Hwang Eunyoung

《22cm》 is another version of 《There is an Egg on a Table》 published in 2015. If one is the relation between number and image, the other is between text and image. In this book, Hwang Eunyoung-Young draws rulers in various scales on the same-sized pages. In this book, numbers have nothing to do with real measurements.

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《There is an end to unfolding, but there is no end to folding》

In this book, Hwang Eunyoung-Young took pictures of the process of unfolding and folding a piece of paper. And then she arranged the unfolding sequence in the first part of the book and the folding sequence in the second part. But the folding sequence never ends. We can fold a piece of paper endlessly 'in theory'. At a point, we can’t see the process of folding paper but it continues. We can imagine it. The title of the book, which speaks about the process of folding, still works. The photo images documenting the process, however, don’t work anymore at some point. From this point, our perception of the folding doesn’t match the images. But in the unfolding sequence, there isn't this contradiction. Because the final image of unfolding is a physically clear unfolded piece of paper.

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