PLEASE NOTE: Covers are unique suminagashi prints and will be selected at random.
June 2023, English, 4 x 4 in., box with 10 loose-leaf folios
Unique suminagashi cover printed at San Francisco Center for the Book, CA.
Edition of 100
If you see me, weep. takes its title from “hunger stones,” five-hundred-year-old boulders with engravings that mark severe droughts and famine, which have recently surfaced in the Elbe River running through Central Europe. All over the world, ruins, relics, and remains are emerging due to historic-level droughts: Buddhist statues in the Yangtze River, a nineteenth century village in a reservoir in Wales, skeletons in Lake Mead, plane wreckages in the melted glaciers of Switzerland, and more. The relics serve as cautionary tales, yet at the same time, reveal long-buried, ignored, or unknown histories. They offer a stark glimpse of our present and nearing challenges, while simultaneously offering clues to a formerly uninvestigated past. Despite the bleak conditions of their time, the hunger stones were made with the future in mind. How do we think of a future in our current stages of climate catastrophe? What would we leave behind as markers of our present condition—as a warning? What else is being revealed, surfaced, unearthed in this moment?
Created through the support of San Francisco Center for the Book's Small Plates Program.
Vivian Sming is an artist-publisher who experiments with books as art, discourse, exhibition, and archive. Since 2017, Sming has published a wide range of artists’ books through their studio Sming Sming Books. They work in close collaboration with artists whose works and ideas inform design, material, and printing choices. Sming is committed to promoting critical discourse, advancing cultural equity, and creating alternative sites of knowledge production through publications and public programs.