Swamp Land – Miss Read

Swamp Land

Swamp Land is an independent publishing collective founded in 2021, working between Taipei, Tokyo, and the broader Asia-Pacific region. The collective produces handmade books in close collaboration with artists across photography, literature, and design.

Their practice is slow by intention. They touch first, then make. Using natural materials — handmade paper, linen thread, beeswax — each publication is built by hand in dialogue with the artist, treating the making process itself as part of the work's meaning.
Swamp Land is drawn to what passes: forgotten objects, weathered traces, the soft threshold where memory begins to blur.

They believe these things carry value not despite their transience, but because of it. For them, the physical book is not a container for documentation, but a form capable of holding loss, tenderness, and the quiet weight of time.
World Tree
Wang Xunzi, World Tree, Swampland, 2025 © Wang Xunzi

A photography project ongoing since 2019. Drawing on shamanist thought, Wang Xunzi observes and photographs trees across different lands, tracing the relationship between humans and the natural world.

In an era where technological development has widened the distance between people and nature, the work documents a sensory connection that is quietly disappearing.

This book asks the reader to step outside a human-centred perspective, and to reconsider the self as part of something larger.

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Shunjing Soup
shio, Shunjing Soup, Swampland, 2025 © shio

A work of short fiction centred on the experience of loss. Rather than speaking grief directly, it traces a single absence through what remains: the warmth of soup left on the table, the fragmentary sensations that linger in the body.

Traditional Chinese medicine packaging is used as the binding, with an ultrasound photograph and botanical specimens tucked inside the folded herb packets.

As the reader opens each packet to read, they move through the story by way of folded paper and material texture — touching, layer by layer, the sediment of memory.

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Soft Fragments
Hsuwei, Soft Fragments, Swampland, 2025 © Hsuwei

Photographer hsuwei known for capturing light and shadow with warmth and tenderness.

This small book gathers a selection of soft traces from his everyday practice of stilling light. In his gaze, things loosen from the frame of reality and settle into quiet reverie.

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The Recording of Dream
Shiki, The Recording of Dream, Shiki, 2025 © Shiki

A work composed from seven dreams recorded over five months. To visualise the ambiguous boundary between reality and imagination that exists within the dream state, mirror paper is used as the printing medium.

The text of each chapter is divided into two parts — one printed normally, the other in mirror reversal — and the complete content can only be read through the reflection on the mirror surface.

The book uses its own structure to convert the experience of dreaming into the act of reading.

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Snowfall
shio, Snowfall, Swampland, 2026 © shio

A photobook made while walking alone through snow at night. Produced with blue handmade paper, this small publication asks to be read slowly — the way snow accumulates, page by page. SHIO's lens does not simply record a silent night; it captures the sensation of a body sinking into that stillness.

To read this book is to walk the same night, together.

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