NEW SPACES

Alex Lebbink runs SinArts, a gallery in The Hague that focuses on Asian contemporary art. We worked together years ago at a Turkish art organization in Amsterdam. Alex is a sinologist, which makes about as much sense as you'd expect. But he's brave enough to dive into the impermeable world of contemporary commercial art, and he does it with actual commitment—lectures, academic newsletters, real network building.

This Saturday I'm doing a public conversation with Yung-shan Tsou. She has a show at the gallery. She'd probably prefer I call her a Berliner—she's lived there 17 years—but her name gives away Taiwanese origins. JFK got away with claiming Berlin, so why not her.

I titled the conversation after a Radiohead song: Where I End and You Begin. That gap between you and me, the space we can't quite bridge. That's exactly where Yung-shan works.

She makes books, but not the kind you read. To her, a book is public space—a place where creator and viewer meet without words. "Typography, Chinese characters, they all become too symbolic and simultaneously empty," she tells me. "I stopped using them entirely."

What's left? Paintings, sticky matter, traces that reference centuries of bookbinding or seventies pamphlets. Stapled, pasted, stained. Little booklets within pages, those mysterious office stickers nobody understands, envelope pieces with windows where things appear behind them. She's leaving breadcrumbs through a world of her own making.

"Take it to the window. Use it as a book," she instructs when I pick up one of her Aufzeichnungen. When I reach pages pasted together: "Just rip them apart!" The tearing sound is the soundtrack.

Here's why this work matters to me: I've spent years thinking about spaces that refuse to force us into frameworks. Architecture that doesn't contain but opens. Art that emerges in the cracks rather than in designated galleries. Yung-shan's books do exactly that—they create space without demanding you fill it in any particular way. No prescribed narrative, no correct interpretation. Just room to exist. You can endlessly ponder over these pages. No need to strain your eyes to recognise the words, translate them into images in your head or try to 'get the picture'.

My mother used to say: "Nobody will ever ask you to pay toll for your thoughts." Meaning your head is the one place you're always safe and free. Yung-shan's books create that space without requiring you to write anything down. A new chapter in Barthes' Death of the Author—except the author's not dead, she's just hiding between the pages.

De Certeau wrote about tactics to escape modern structures. Yung-shan handed me a new one. Life hack.