INFO PROGRAM SPECIAL EDITION
The Borderless Shelf: Re-imagining a Library Space
无边书架：重新想象一个图书馆
Digital Publication
English
Published in 2026
Commissioned by Asymmetry
Concept and Editor: te editionsInterviewees: Sam Kim (Common Imprint), Nikki Lam (Slow Burn Books) and Jiaoyang Li (Accent Sisters)
Commissioned Writer: Sharon X.Liu
Designer: Sixuan Tong
This publication marks both the conclusion of te editions’ threemonth residency as librarians-in-residence at Asymmetry and a continuation of the questions that emerged from it. Titled “The Borderless Shelf: Re-imagining a Library Space,” the residency set out to examine how knowledge moves, accumulates, and transforms across contexts. Rather than treating the library as a fixed physical site, the project asks how a library might function as a flexible, shifting structure—one that adapts to displacement, translation, and uncertainty. In a fragmented world, what can a library located “elsewhere” hold, support, or make possible? A second thread running through the residency focuses on Asian publications. This emphasis reflects both the historically fragile condition of books across many parts of Asia and the mission of Asymmetry. Texts have often been rewritten, censored, or interrupted by political and social upheaval, while books themselves have been lost, destroyed, or deliberately erased. From this perspective, the project asks whether an Asian library situated outside its place of origin might serve as a form of refuge—not only for books as objects, but for the knowledge, memory, and ways of thinking they carry. At the same time, it considers whether such a library can become a site of encounter: a space for gathering, exchange, and the formation of an offline community in the present.