Antoine Lefebvre started this photographic series during a residency at the Palais des paris in Japan in 2016. The kanji 本, pronounced \hon\, means book when it is alone, but it can mean numerous other things when associated with other ideograms. It is for example the second ideogram in 日本, Japan in Japanese. During his residency, he would go looking for the kanji 本 he would usually find outside of bookshops on big colorful signs. He produced a small brochure with all the photographs in a format inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Photogrids. 

The succession of 本 signs in the pages of the book tells this story. The first hundred of them come from the residency trip in 2016, then comes what he found in other countries and the ones that were generated through his own activities. Most of the second part of the book are the pictures taken during the second trip in 2019 and in Paris until 2020.

本の本の本 2016 – 2020
antoine lefebvre editions, 2021

259 x 264 mm, 48 pp
offset printing sewn binding, 500 copies. 

本の本の本 2016 – 2020, Limited edition of 12 

This special edition was conceived to look like a Sol LeWitt sculpture. The idea was to reveal that the margins of the original layout were drawing the same kind of shapes seen often in LeWitt 3D works.