Weight of Insomnia

Liu Xiaodong: Weight of Insomnia is a book/catalogue designed for Lisson Gallery and detailing the process of Liu Xiaodong’s technologically radical project that’s been ongoing since 2015, where large painting machines connected to live streaming cameras around the world painted scenes of urban landscapes, each robot painting continuously for 3 months, day and night, slowly rendering a monochrome image.

The bilingual book is typeset entirely in 12pt SimSun (Zhongyi Electronics Co.), a standard Chinese-first mono serif typeface lending a digital and sometimes sinister quality to the pages.

Silver ink is used extensively throughout this book, a reference to the glow of the screen and the metallic machine, suspending the book in a constant flux between light and dark. Process images have been printed in five colours using Color Library’s CMYK+Silver profile.

240×320 mm, hardback, 184 pp