盗时者手记

Notes from a Time Bandit

Book Design, Typography

130 × 187 mm, 112 pages
Simplified Chinese

Notes from a Time Bandit is a collection of fictional stories written by Hu Fang. In this collection, readers will encounter numerous characters: a person who attempts to run away from the turbulence yet again and again he finds himself in the abandoned garden; a headsman who performs his duty in the cries of the masses; an architect who tries hard to convince himself to build prisons for his own kind; a volunteer who participates in the experiments for the mission to Mars so as to redeem himself. It begins with Fang’s attempt to depict a person and ends in a ‘blind faith’. (vitamincreativespace, 2017)

In one chapter of the book, the protagonist studies prototypes of penitentiaries from different times of the world history, such as Panopticon, Narrenturm etc. The imagery employed on the cover is an architecture plan of Millbank Prison, which was operated between 1816 and 1890. The construction of the prison consisted of a circular chapel at the centre surrounded by a three-storey hexagon for authorities, and the six-pentagon in the outermost part is the cell blocks. The calculated structure of the institutional building echoes some of the crucial concepts in the book as an explorative idea of a highly human-controlled living space.

↑ full video of the project

Client/Author    Fang HU
Editors    Fang HU, Yee Kuen PANG
Publisher    The Pavilion (Beijing) and Big Whale (Berlin)
Graphic Design & Production    Lai Ping SO @mmmmor
Printing & Binding    In Production & Printing Company Ltd., Hong Kong