R.A.S | Feng Shan

R.A.S is a self-published artist's book. It grew out of Perhaps Some Verses, a series of drawings that artist Feng Shan made during an artist residency in Paris.

Because Feng Shan could not read French, she imagined the words written on the streets to be like beautiful sentences. In reality, however, they were markings for roadworks — notes that workers had written temporarily on the ground. They apparently recorded things such as the numbers of the cement used in the works. In other words, it was a beautiful misunderstanding. She drew these letters together with the puddles and fallen leaves on the streets of Paris.

When Feng Shan introduced this work, she said, "Walking the streets of Paris and seeing one handwritten French word after another, the walk itself felt like reading a poem." So it was decided to turn these drawings into a book that looks like a collection of poems. As you turn the pages, it looks as if you are reading a poem line by line. And when the whole book is unfolded, it becomes one long poem. On the reverse side are images of the ground of Paris, expressing the Paris she felt.

The book's title, R.A.S, comes from the abbreviation of a phrase she saw again and again in the streets of France. At first she did not know what it meant, but as she looked into it she learned that it means "Rien à signaler" (nothing to report; by extension, "all clear"). She became deeply interested in the nuance of the phrase and adopted it as the title of this book.

Publisher: Surfacing Press
Publication year: 2026
Dimensions: 247 × 97 × 10 mm
Language: English

Feng Shan / Contemporary Art / Art Monograph