Julie Chen (book artist)

Education and teaching

Born in Inglewood, California, Julie Chen completed an undergraduate degree in printmaking at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. She subsequently became interested in book arts and got a degree in book arts from Mills College in 1989. She began teaching in that program as an adjunct in 1996 and became an associate professor in 2010. She has also taught at California College of the Arts, and she frequently lectures on book arts and gives workshops around the country.

Career

Chen has achieved prominence by creating conceptually sophisticated works that combine traditional techniques such as letterpress printing and hand bookbinding with more modern technologies such as photopolymer plates and laser cutting. She is known for pushing the structural boundaries of the artist's book with a range of architectural and sculptural approaches. At the same time, her work is praised for its high standard of production and emphasis on the artist's book as a tactile experience.

In 1987, Chen founded Flying Fish Press to publish limited-edition artist's books. Many are by Chen herself and some are collaborations with the artist Barbara Tetenbaum. The press's elaborate and meticulously produced publications include such elements as game boards (Personal Paradigm), sliding pages (True to Life), windows and trays (Full Circle), and moveable elements (Praxis (Illustrated)). Chen's 1992 book Octopus, with text by poet Elizabeth McDevitt, features a tunnel-like pop-up element known in the book trade as a peep show. It offers a three-dimensional underwater scene with the tentacles of an octopus extending behind the words, creating a physical analogue of the poem, which speaks of concealment, disguise, and distance. Bon Bon Mots, a meditation on the fleeting sweetness of life, takes the form of a box of chocolates, each of which, on being unwrapped, reaveals itself as a tiny book. These show the range of approaches Chen brings to each project: of the five 'chocolate box' books, "Social Graces" is a lotus-fold type, "Life Cycle" is a tetra-tetra flexagon, "Elegy" is a concertina with leaf-shaped pages in a clay cover, "Labyrinth" is ball-in-a-maze type of puzzle in a paper slipcase, and "Either/Or" is a "magic wallet". Chen has also worked with the volvelle or wheel chart, which is a set of stacked paper disks of varying sizes, sometimes with windows.

Chen’s books are in the collections of libraries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).