The Bored Wolves Inn
The Bored Wolves Inn
Oscar CHAN Yik Long on “Melted Stars”
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Oscar CHAN Yik Long on “Melted Stars”

“Once the splash is done”

In Melted Stars (Bored Wolves, October), his forthcoming zine of astral choreographies and ink-spawned mythologies, Helsinki-based Hong Kong artist Oscar CHAN Yik Long taps the ecstatically eldritch by splashing ink on paper and then letting the mind-in-his-hand intuit a creature. Rapidly drawing these mythic beings out of the shadows and into the spectacular light, the artist gorgeously renders some wretched ends.

Oscar, with whom we’ll be working on a longer book next year, immersed himself in the process he describes in the recording above in a way that caused my jaw to drop. Over the course of three days he plunged headfirst into the ink and the far reaches of his imagination. It was a stunning, inspiriting thing to witness. And some relief when he surfaced.

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Melted Stars, which will be collaboratively released in Basel, Switzerland with PF25 (Basel+Hong Kong) cultural projects as part of the PF25 Hands pop-up (10.21–11.6, Spalenberg 30), is our first back-to-basics photocopy zine: edition of 100, 16 pages, black and white, photocopied by a fellow with old (and, from the brilliant result, methinks enchanted) copiers in Budapest, and stapled.

This begins an ongoing series of Bored Wolves zines to be published in addition to our offset books. The latter have longer development and production trajectories, so it’s nice to also have the flexibility afforded by the quicker zine process. Still, we’re aiming to nail a coherent, self-contained internal arc scaled to those 16 pages.

Next up: a zine of Japanese artist Misa Asanuma’s rapid pen-and-ink drawings of Noh actors.

Oscar’s Collapse Rabbit on the cover.