I’m taking off in a few days to head to Brno in the Czech Republic for the 27th Brno Biennial. Kiyonori Muroga and I will be speaking on June 18 alongside design luminaries like Jon Sueda, Wayne Daly, Emily King and Manuel Raeder. You can see details here.

As mentioned earlier, Muroga-san and I are curating The Study Room at the Biennial.

The Study Room is organized into nine different thematic ‘islands’, loose groupings that explode national boundaries and general Orientalizing tendencies – instead unifying collections of publications under intuitive rubrics of expression.

The Islands:

• Ordering the World
• Connecting Cultures
• Configuration of Space
• Gesture
• Symbolism & Culture-building
• Space & Texture
• Modernity-building
• Poesis
• Organizing Contemporary Culture
• Visualizing Language
• Analysis

Each island is populated by publications proposed by designers with some connection to Asia chosen by Muroga-san and I. The contributors to the Study Room include:

• Aaron Nieh, Taipei
• Åbäke, London
• Kyungsun Kymn, Seoul
• Yah-Leng Yu / Foreign Policy Design Group, Singapore
• Yukimasa Matsuda, Tokyo
• Javin Mo, Hong Kong
• Leonard Koren, San Francisco
• Philippe Egger, Villars-sur-Glâne
• Daijiro Ohara, Tokyo
• Caryn Aono, Los Angeles
• Shutaro Mukai, Tokyo
• Yoshihisa Shirai, Tokyo
• Guang Yu, Beijing
• Fumio Tachibana, Tokyo
• Kohei Sugiura, Tokyo
• Kenya Hara, Tokyo
• Helmut Schmid, Osaka
• Nobuhiro Yamaguchi, Tokyo
• HeiQuiti Harata, Tokyo
• Jens Müller, Düsseldorf
• Xiao Mage & Cheng Zi, Beijing
• Shin Akiyama, Niigata
• Wang Zhi-Hong, Taipei
• Tetsuya Goto, Osaka
• John Warwicker, Melbourne
• so+ba / Alex Sonderegger + Susanna Baer, Zurich & Tokyo
• Peter Biľak, The Hague
• Ryan Hageman, Chicago
• Hattori Kazunari, Tokyo
• Na Kim, Seoul
• Kirti Trivedi, Mumbai
• Lu Jingren, Beijing
• Santi Lawrachawee, Bangkok
• Chris Ro, Seoul
• Randy Nakamura, Los Angeles
• Sulki and Min Choi, Seoul

Muroga-san and I each contributed one book each to particular islands, and you know, I’m pretty damn excited about the Study Room collection. It’s got some really exciting, super-rare books—some are super-strange, others are more sober, and many explode our ideas of what books might or might not be. As a collection, it is not overly academic, nor is it overly pedestrian. It will surprise and delight, and *that* is the best.