Northing/Kinakaal forlag
Kinakaal is an art publication project run by Northing - Centre for East Asian Art and Culture in Bergen, Norway. With Kinakaal, Northing wishes to open up new opportunities for conversations and collaborations between East Asia and Norway to explore various cultural dimensions in the physical form of a book. Kinakaal wishes to facilitate direct contact and cooperation between East-Asian and Norwegian artists and designers through art publication and design projects. Up to now (January 2025) Kinakaal has won four times in the Most Beautiful Norwegian Books for the Year competition and received multiple international design awards.
From 2004 to 2023, No.223 has crafted a unique artistic world through his photographic vision. This 20th-anniversary photobook is more than. a retrospective; it’s an exploration of artistic freedom and the timeless vitality of youth. It invites readers to reflect on the past while embracing the enduring creative spirit that defines No.223’s work.
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The book Bird of Paradise began with an encounter between artist Anne Tveit Knutsen and the late florist Rikhard Rune Juuhl (1952–2023), who had already fallen into the clutches of Parkinson’s disease and dementia. Drawing on the empathy and caregiving instinct from her previous work as a nurse, Anne developed her brief friendship with the gradually fading florist into a poignant project centred on the trinity of old age, floristry, and fine art.
The book gathers essays by well-established artists, philosophers, sociologists, art historians, and nurses, each exploring these themes from their own perspective and area of expertise. Designer Yilei Wang subtly embedded the connection between the three elements in the design details—such as the lenticular cover featuring negative images of withdrawing roots, and the page edges, which shift in colour from green to yellow.
As Anne asks in the introduction: What does it mean to flourish as a human being, even in the face of serious illness or disability?
Curatorial Statement
The current exhibition, “Book Nomad”, at Northing Space - the multifunctional Centre for East Asian art and culture in downtown Bergen, is a travelling exhibition with an ever-growing collection of books that started its journey from Beijing through East and South-East Asia and many international hub cities in Europe including Milan, Paris, Berlin, Rotterdam and Vienna and finally landed in Bergen, the last stop of its two-year-long globetrotting.
As one of many co-curators who got the opportunity to add titles to the collection with their own interpretation of the given keyword “Asianness”, I realised how the quality of being Asian has long roamed away from the continent that gave it its definition (or rather, the code name) and spread all over the places following the global migration and mobility trends. As one of millions of new diasporas from East Asia living and working in a European society, I’m not only observing the fluidity and adaptivity of the culture I originally came from, but also working proactively to reshape and recontextualise it by curating dynamic encounters between the West and East, to challenge the dichotomic approaches generally applied in social and cultural studies. Our curatorial strategy, which is practised throughout our cross-disciplinary program including exhibitions, publications, public events and performances, emphasises more on bridging and integrating rather than promoting and distinguishing.
On this specific occasion, we engaged a local artist (not to drown in another elaboration on the definition of local – a Danish artist based in Bergen) Mette Sandfær, to set up the exhibition for the books that all carry the duty to define or redefine Asianness. This decision in itself has the intention to soften some boundaries, including the one between two neighbouring disciplines: installation art and furniture/exhibition design. The artist understood perfectly her task and built up a chaotic structure using found objects that are imprinted with details from the quotidian Norwegian/Bergenese life rather than something stereotypically Asian.