FAR NEAR is pleased to announce the release of Vol. 4 – Guidance. This edition of their annual printed book aims to recover the past, document the present as it stands, and try to make sense of the future. We are journeying, sometimes lost and without a clear purpose, learning about ourselves and each other along the way. Some of these stories are about triumphs and discoveries from decades earlier; they tell us where we’ve been to help us know where to go. Some are brief pauses in a point in time — pure yet fleeting moments of contemplation and emotion that connect and ground us, to make us realize that we are not just floating and accelerating here, alone. Some are offers of hope to the future, to a youthful point of view, celebrating those that will follow us, in time. 

We speak to artists like Vietnamese American filmmaker, writer, literary theorist, composer, and professor Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Hong Kong photographer and former fashion editor of Amoeba Magazine Kary Kwok, photographers Leslie Shang, Ibrahem Hasan, Vince Aung, Hu Yang, Tirtha Lawati, Brendan George Ko and more. We collaborate with Turkey-based non-profit Sirkhane DARKROOM to create a story and tote fundraiser incorporating Syrian refugee childrens’  photography and drawings. Alex Zhang Hungtai offers us an improvisational piano score, Dayun Ryu, Rachel Be-Yun Wang, and Justin Wong create a fictional index and Tess Ayano documents the beacon of home for Asian New Yorkers known as Sunrise Mart.

Dust jacket unfolds to reveal an original poster  featuring illustrations from Urara Muramatsu and photography from Sirkhane DARKROOM.

FAR-NEAR is an international cross-cultural books series, curated annually, that broadens perspectives of Asia through image, person, idea and history to unlearn the inherent dominative mode.

The Asian continent and its people have often been expressed through the lens of a foreign eye -painted as "the other" to a  Western audience. Extending beyond the Far East, FAR-NEAR features voices from Japan to Iran and just about everywhere in between.