About 👀

Sming Sming Books is the publishing studio of artist Vivian Sming, experimenting with books as art, discourse, exhibition, and archive. Formed in 2017, the studio designs and publishes a wide range of artists’ books, zines, and editions in close collaboration with artists whose works and ideas inform design, material, and printing choices. Sming Sming Books is invested in creating books from practices that are challenging to represent on paper. The studio is committed to promoting critical discourse and advancing cultural equity through the format of publishing.

A selection of titles are publicly accessible in over 130 libraries, museums, and universities, nation- and worldwide, and have been featured in aperture, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, and the New York Times. Sming Sming Books received the Shannon Michael Cane Memorial Award from Printed Matter, Inc. in 2018 and a San Francisco Art Book Fair Publishing Grant in 2020. Current support for Sming Sming Books is provided, in part, by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program. Past workshops and lectures have been held at ArtCenter, Asia Art Archive in America, California College of the Arts, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and SFAI. 

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Preoccupied with ethics and the tension between theory and practice, Vivian Sming works as an artist-publisher to explore language, representation, access, and the juxtaposition of ideas, politics, and positions. Sming holds a BA in Art from UCLA and an MFA from CalArts, and has over a decade of experience with art book publishing as a designer, writer, editor, and DIY bookmaker. Sming was previously a Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Curatorial Fellow at the Letterform Archive, Guest Curator for the Vancouver Art Book Fair, and a Small Plates Artist at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Sming is currently Associate Director of Academic and Public Programs at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and will be exhibiting their work with Sming Sming Books at the Center for Book Arts in New York in Fall 2023.

Sming Sming Book’s logo artwork is by Joseph Lee. 🐯

Learn about how we work with artists.

Printers We ❤️
Bookmobile (Minneapolis)
Colpa Press (San Francisco)
Lightning Press (Santa Clara)

Partners
For the Birds Trapped in Airports
Memory and Resistance Laboratory
crystalline morphologies
Drawing Room Records

Past Partners & Clients
Art + Practice
Art Practical
at land's edge
Candor Arts
The Getty Research Institute
Hunter College Art Galleries
INCITE Journal of Experimental Media
Living Room Light Exchange
Occidental College
San Francisco Cinematheque
Southern Exposure
Wolfman Books
X Artists’ Books