accordion publications: Yita, The Street of Plain Happyness, China, 2023

front cover

I'm going to let the artist explain what's happening here:

"For me, the Street of Plain Happiness is the traditional morning market in Northeast China.

When I was a child, I felt like I could find everything here - lots of delicious

food and lots of joy. The people running street vendors are resilient and

interesting. In the winter, with temperatures dropping to minus twenty or

thirty degrees Celsius, the morning market has hardly ever stopped for

decades.

I used an Olympus-PenF half-frame film camera to take these photos in

September 2019. In three years that followed, after many closures and

lockdowns because of COVID-19, the warmth and vibrancy faded away.

The 'street' came back after the pandemic. After surviving, I hope that

people can live peacefully in an unknown place.

The backside of the book is adorned with traditional "spring couplets'

written in calligraphy on a red background, depicting the most

representative street scene of the morning market and reflecting the

essence of urban culture. Unfolding the book on the table, the three-

dimensional street model can be formed by standing the folded paper on

both sides, presenting another perspective to tell the story of the morning

market. Folding and unfolding it, you can feel the atmosphere of the Street

of Plain Happiness, as if strolling through it."

Yita's use of this particular type of folded map has an interesting history within artists' books. This technique of depicting a street and its businesses was used most notably by Ed Ruscha in his artists' book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), but there was one predecessor in a publication titled Ginza Haccho (1954) by the Japanese writer and artist Shohachi Kimura with photographs by Yoshikazu Suzuki. Its interesting to me that Yita does not address this history.

30 double-sided pages, individually 4.75" x 3.25" and when unfolded 8' 1.5"