Title: east eats west eats east us thing

Photographer/s: david tin mouth

Date of publication: August 2010

Place of publication: Toronto, Canada

Dimensions: 6″ by 9″

Edition size: 500

Type of binding: matte lamination, perfect bind

Number of pages: 104

Type of paper: Natural Roland Opaque 140M

Number of pictures: 40

Type of printing: offset

Printer: Transcontinental/Metrolitho

Publisher: press press press

Designer: david tin mouth, cover by Huan Huan

Editor: david tin mouth

Language: English

ISBN: 978-0-9813964-1-5

Category: video stills and poetic text art

Price: $11.95

Summary: east eats west eats east us is an outsider’s meditation on China, undertaken not long before 2008 brought that country’s rise into dramatic focus. There is an abstracted and musical quality to this vision of China, and readers who allow the words and images to flow by without taking hold will hopefully find themselves carried along like someone sitting alone in a movie theatre. Maybe this letting go is a part of the challenge david tin mouth lays down for his readers. That said, a careful struggle with the language and images of this book can unearth resonances not visible the first time through. The four-part wave poems, cobbled together from small quotations of one or two words lifted from articles and newswire reports about China, are some of the first pages that will open to readers in this way. Likely their wave-like forms point in part to how technology is changing knowledge – and so also the way people see each other across cultural divides.

As for the book itself, it was made in China (and Tibet) in 2006. The video stills are from footage that david tin mouth shot while on the road that year. They are mostly from Sichuan and Guizhou provinces, although some are from footage shot in Lhasa. The sections of text art in plain type were also composed on the road at roughly the same time as the video stills, while the italicized parts, which tend to be more abstract, were added later on. These scraps of text were then transformed back at home through a sometimes random process involving photocopiers and scanners. The nod to the concrete poets of the sixties and seventies is definitely clear here just as it is at times in the artist’s perspective; but there is nonetheless also something resolutely contemporary to this artist’s vision.

Date and place of birth of photographer/s: August 12th, 1972

Website: www.davidtinmouth.com

Book link: www.presspresspress.com

Donated by: press press press

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