The handmade book exhibition in Beijing Photo: Courtesy of Xiao Tian

A group of Chinese artists and scholars, including Xu Bing, Wan Jie and Zhu Junbo, shared their views about handmade artists' books during a livestream of the Book Design Talks forum on Friday in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen to mark World Book Day. 

At the forum in Beijing, artist Xu Bing explained that the uniqueness of these handmade books, which are quite different from normal reading about text or pictures. 

"Through various means, artists are making reading a kind of miracle with a rich selection of materials," he said. 

Pan Yanrong, a designer, said that compared to large-scale book printing, handmade book artists can express their own concept and ideas without having to consider budgets or the scale of printing. 

In Shanghai, Zhou Chen pointed to handmade book Old Trades of Jiangsu: A Glimpse, the winner of the 2019 Best Book Design from All Over the World competition held in Leipzig, Germany. The book used cheap paper that old shops used to wrap refreshments instead of traditional printing paper.

The host of the talks, Chinese Artron Art Group also held three exhibitions in the cities featuring handmade and ancient books.