Interview #204 — W.H. Chong

by James Jiang

W.H. Chong has designed covers for Helen Garner, Gerald Murnane, and Peter Singer, and has also designed Australian Book Review, Meanjin, and Griffith Review. In 2013 the Australian Book Designers Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. His portrait drawings of the creative community will be published in 2023 in a book titled When I See Someone I Want to Draw Them.

W.H. Chong talked to James Jiang about his career in print design, Australian cultural amnesia, and the ‘weirdness’ of calling oneself an artist.

What early experiences or enthusiasms do you think helped equip you for the work you do now?

I think it’s my mother. My mother’s father was a very clever man and he was kind of an amateur designer-inventor. On his own terms, he reinvented things that would seal plastic bags—‘nutty professor’ type things. His kids—my mother, who was the oldest child, and her half-siblings from his second wife—all had artistic talent of some kind and there would be a lot of drawing around. I remember visiting my grandparents’ house with my cousins growing up—this was in Ipoh in Malaysia—and they had done murals on their bedroom walls, [which were] incredibly impressive and charming.

So there was always a sense that people just did stuff and my mother was always doing things: clothes for the kids, baking, dress-making; she was a housewife for quite a long time [so] she’d also do art courses. She did copper tooling, a kind of metal work (making pictures out of copper), Chinese painting, and she learned to play the organ. She entered politics in mid-life, so that was kind of weird. But she did say later on (which I thought was just fantastic): ‘don’t forget to have something to do when you retire’.

That was her oblique way of saying, there’s other stuff than your job, I guess? When you grow up in Malaysia, you don’t typically imagine yourself being an artist. But I had this idea growing up that I would become an advertising executive, [which would mean] I could make pictures and stuff. I knew very early on that I was going to do picture things and I always knew I was never going to study or pursue a scholarship.

Were there pictures or any other things that you remember seeing or feeling an affinity with at that age?

I do have some picture memories. So around the house there’d be the Fu Lu Shou statues, calligraphy on the wall, Chinese vases. So there was always a strong Chinese design aesthetic around me. The picture that is most memorable to me was in one of my father’s library books (he was a doctor); it’s one picture I can’t forget (which is a problem)—it showed a frog with a slug parasite that had eaten its way under the frog’s skin. There were also pictures of limbs, things with abscesses and pus, terrible lesions. Very memorable. But they would not have been more powerful than TV, which we got when I was six years old. Bonanza is probably as strong a visual memory.

In your poem ‘Hakka Land’, you write about your heritage and your family’s experience of migration to the land of ‘Arnott’s Family Assorted’. You suggest that Australia is a kind of ‘Hakka Land’ because etymologically ‘Hakka’ is kè-jiā, ‘guest family’. What was Australia like when you migrated and more specifically, depending on what you felt about your vocation at that stage, what role did art or design play in the process of acculturation, of creating a sense of belonging or not-belonging when you arrived?

I came here to do a design course, so it was already instrumental before it even became …

Can I ask why you came to Australia to do a design course?

I wasn’t coming to Australia; I was leaving Malaysia. I could have gone to London, or Toronto. I had a couple of siblings who were doing their studies here, so it wasn’t [that I wanted to go to] Australia particularly. It was somewhere to go and I was going to do some kind of art-oriented thing. Design was a commercially feasible art-oriented career. It was all very practical. I ended up doing graphic design at Swinburne.

When you got there, what were your relations with the rest of your cohort like?

I guess they were as mysterious to me as I might have been to them. Because I didn’t have an Australian background, I didn’t know what they were carrying on about, I wasn’t hanging around in pubs drinking until whenever, I wasn’t going around to rock’n’roll parties or going to listen to the band at the pub—none of those things.

Where did you live when you first moved here?

So I actually spent a year in Warrnambool. When I did the Victorian HSC in Kuala Lumpur, I went up to the principal of Taylor's College, this Aussie guy called Miles something, and I said, ‘It says here in the VUAC Handbook (Victorian Universities Admission Committee) for these courses that interviews are required to happen in December, so I should go and attend them, shouldn’t I?’ I had picked all design courses—starting with RMIT (because it had ‘Royal’ in it and that sounded good), and you had to bring a portfolio.

He responded, ‘Oh, don't worry, they’ll take you by your marks’—which is, as it turned out, complete nonsense. They did not take you by your marks and the only place that did was my seventh choice, the Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education, which offered an art course, not a design course—they took you regardless because it was a nowhere place. And I ended up in Warrnambool for a whole year doing art, which is not what I expected. It was an extraordinarily good time. I am very grateful for it now; otherwise it would have been unforgivable.

I transferred to Swinburne the following year. And as I discovered, they really did take you according to your interview and your folio, they did not ask anything about your results whatsoever. You went in and there was a panel of six people behind trestle tables, who asked to see six pieces of work. Everyone brought like, eighty-five pieces. They looked at the first six and they said, ‘Please put it all away.’ So everyone went, ‘What, what? But I brought all this stuff?!’ They just wanted to see your first six pieces. If you brought up the wrong six pieces, you were done. It was extraordinary—they had 2000 applicants for sixty spots. So, it was a really unusual thing compared to the present, because after the first year—it was a three-year course and after the first year, I think, they lost half their numbers. So from sixty in first year, it went down to like forty or thirty in second-year—a very high attrition rate! I mean, you can’t fail anyone now …

I watched a masterclass you gave at UTS for a visual communication subject in which you talked about your career prior to Text. So you started out in newspapers, The Age, in their New Projects Department, working on Australian Pensioners Weekly. It's a very interesting demographic to have started out working for. What was the biggest challenge?

It just meant that I got to see up and down and left and right. I didn’t start in the ghetto, I started out in the broadest possible way.

What was the transition to book publishing like in the early years of Text Media, now Text Publishing?

I spent quite a lot of time designing newspapers. I actually went to look for a design studio job and I went to this place—my best friend from school did too and he got the job instead of me. So I ended up rocking up to the New Projects Department at David Syme, which was The Age back then, and became a designer doing whatever publications went through the department. And then I start working on the redesign of The Age. And then I went and did the new version of The Herald, which was the last afternoon newspaper in the world. After that, I went to design The Sunday Age, which was a new thing [when I started]. Around that time, I also joined Text Media, which involved starting things like the first of the glossy property weekly publications—the first thing in that lot was the Melbourne Weekly. Text Media was a whole bunch of different things [then], and it included books. So that's where the books came in. So I didn’t start out being a book designer; I was a designer doing print publications.

You said you tried to introduce or to convince The Age to start using [the font] Times New Roman. What were they using before? Courier or something?

That sounds very focused and intentional, but really I was doing redesign with Russell Skelton, who was in charge. And naturally I thought, let's use Times because The Times are using it. And [so] when I got to the editor, the late Creighton Burns, he asked, ‘What is this font?’ I said, ‘It's Times New Roman from The London Times,’ and he said, ‘We can't use this. It's too modern.’ We had some crappy linotext type which didn't even have a name. It was inherited from the kind of actual hot-press setting that we used to have. Before it became this kind of offset printing, where you have typesetting (bear with me—this process involves a lot of different stages) that was essentially photographically reproduced onto plates, which then did offset printing for newspapers as we know it now. But before that, you had the old style setting of type in hot metal by actual typesetters (people!). When I arrived at The Age, they were slowly pushing out trolleys of type to be disposed of.

Don Busmer, my first editor, used to type on his typewriter on little sheets of triplicate—one sentence for each sheet of triplicate. And when he finished writing his article or story, he would have a bundle this high, and he’d tie a rubber band around it and say, ‘Boy!’ And the boy would come into the room—these were actual boys—and take it down to the typesetters. You had to be an extraordinarily practiced craftsman to create a story one sentence at a time, keeping it all in your head. It's an amazing restraint that people like that have. He would come down from the country town where he lived, staying at a hotel around the corner, and over the next three or four days, he put all of it together, just like that. Incredible. He was a pro.

That understanding of handmade craft is something we don't really have now. So at Swinburne, we were learning how to letter with pen and ink and brush. And our typesetting was limited to either using a typewriter with a changeable golf-ball head, which meant very limited and spindly type. Or you could set it through the camera one letter at a time onto photographic paper and develop it. Or you could hand paint it. Or you could do a complicated process where you transferred it onto your silkscreen and you silkscreened the thing. And there was no computer in Swinburne when I left it—the first computer in this country arrived in 1987, I think, in an industrial context, used at The Herald to make little graphics for the newspaper. It was one of those little Apple box things, over which the typesetters’ union—the Printing and Kindred Industries Union—went on strike for a week.

Of course, Murdoch won because it was the time of the Wapping dispute [in Britain]. Yeah, I think the people who ran the unions really did have a good sense of what would happen. They just didn't realise, and nobody did [of course], quite how extraordinary it was going to be. That whole lot of big boiler-suited tradies going up for a week-long strike over this little thing …

Do you think there are still avenues where craft comes through?

There are a lot of extremely refined skills at play now—not in the same artisanal craft way—but in digital forms. The level of book design now is extraordinary. It is sort of a new golden age, because of computers, which have had many destructive effects but also created very powerful tools, and people who know how to use it have produced extraordinary things. If you look at what's around in terms of book production now, it’s amazing. You have to see what's coming out of Europe and North America, where they have no budget [constraints], lots of resources and incredible choices of paper and printing. It’s just mind-boggling. And they can do it at scale, and they can do it even though the books might be expensive, but they’re made affordable in a way now that would not have been possible in the past. Nowadays you can print one book if you want to through something like Blurb, which was unthinkable. That would not have happened before broadband, let alone computers.

Is there anything distinctive about book design culture in Australia?

So in certain areas, like mainstream literary fiction and nonfiction and so on, there is a particular taste that Australians—or maybe I should say Australian publishers, and therefore the designers, and therefore the buyers—have, in the same way that there's a very strong cookbook design culture in Australia. But we can see everything now, so it’s not possible not to be influenced by elsewhere. I think in a way, finally, the old saying, ‘the world is your oyster’ is true. I mean, we can finally access the world. The oyster is now digital.

In your Guardian piece about the Elena Ferrante covers, you argued that designers who use irony put themselves in a very tricky position. It was interesting to me because it was no longer just a debate about commercial viability, but seemed to be making a critical intervention …

I wonder if that really is true. I do think that my view of these things is very much inflected by its commercial context, because I don't see book design as an individual art adventure—to me, that doesn't seem to make sense for either publisher, author or audience. There are areas you can do that within books, such as with experimental and independently-produced books; there are indie publishers who do that kind of thing. But I'm not working for that type of publisher. We're trying to sell books, because that makes everyone happy: the people in the company, the author, the audience. You have to respect that context. It's not about me.

You were saying it's also about doing justice to the book, rather than, say, playing a kind of game with the readership that then aids the commercial motive … ?

Well, you have to be very sure of yourself. If you are going to say, ‘We are now entering a game, which we are confident is consensual and have understood from every angle’. You're making a big judgment call.

What do you see as the relationship between the design work that you do and your practice as an exhibiting artist? Do you compartmentalise it? Is it a relief sometimes to be able to work without having a commercial brief, or are those kinds of constraints generative for you?

I think a lot of well-known artists have also taught—I mean really famous artists. They will say, ‘Oh yes, teaching is a very important and useful thing because the kids teach me a lot, blah blah, blah blah.’ But the trick is that they're all in the same stream. They're designing and then they're teaching the kids design; or they're painting and they're teaching the kids painting. So there's a feedback loop here. If I'm painting, I'm not thinking about designing at all; I'm painting. For me, [painting] is an entirely solipsistic activity. I don't need to worry about anyone else. I can free myself not only from design, but from any other kind of expectation(s). Artists who have careers also have to work to the expectations of the art world in the same way that when you design a book within a particular mainstream context, you have to pay attention to that.

[When I paint], I do not have to pay attention to the art world [because] I do not have an art career. And if, as de Kooning says, art is freedom, then for me this is the use of art. I can be free of constraints, commercial or otherwise.

And that is what you can do with poetry, too, especially, because there's zero expectation of any kind of return. So the only thing you can ask for, in a way, is the kudos of your peers and publishers. But you don't [have to] care about that, too, because, after all, it is so minuscule that if you were successful, it wouldn't mean anything more outside of that small circle. And so you should be free to write how you want to write. Shouldn’t you?

But are there certain things that you think in your exhibiting work have been informed by design? I'm thinking about, say, the portrait you did of Michelle de Kretser. Almost the grammar of that painting and the kind of visual literacy it demands, in terms of the quotations, the little vignette of Patrick White … Is there something about the way that image is put together which shows these two practices feeding each other?”
No, because the framework for that painting, and the way the references come about, is not from design, except in the broadest sense of the word ‘design’ (as in the Italian word ‘disegno’). It’s like history painting, a very old form, which has been more or less been neglected since the modernist era, but it has, in many different ways, come back. In fact, it is very strong—I don't know if they even use the term in the US now, but among Black artists, it's certainly a very strong deployment of the history painting mode. So [my portrait of de Kretser] is a kind of history painting—it has to do with her life and times.

You are quite active on Instagram, and you've also spoken about our contemporary moment as the most ‘media-saturated of eras’. Is the bookstore still the primary context in which you first envisage the cover appearing? Are you conscious of how the cover is going to look, say, on Instagram or on social media? Do the alternative contexts in which a consumer might come across the book weigh upon the design decisions that you make?

Not at all. Here's something that a friend of mine, Zoe Sadokierski, usefully says: ‘Authors don't send us books. They send us manuscripts, and we make the books.’ I think that's actually perfect, because when I read the manuscript, I know that it’s at a particular stage … I don't know if it's been completely edited, and that’s before it’s [type]set or designed or marketed or any of these things. So when I'm reading the manuscript, I'm trying to find a tone or feeling or a story that translates into something that I can use in the cover. I don't know how other designers work because I think that my work is probably kind of old school.

What do you mean by that?

So the Australian Book Design Association (ABDA) just put out their shortlist for the annual awards, and I think the current styles quite often have a lot of things going on—they're quite dense—and the old school thing is about elegance or economy.

So I'm trying to always have the least possible thing. It’s not that I haven't tried doing lots of things, but instead, my tendency is to have the least [going on, design-wise]. It's a very tricky thing to reduce a very rich narrative to a flat cover. You can't produce a video for the cover, though they might produce videos for you on the book website [after it’s published]. It’s the whole poetic compression thing, isn't it? You're just trying to find that one thing that's enough to trigger and suggest everything. I mean, it's never going to be correct or even truthful, but you can make a broad hint. I mean, it's not for nothing that you see famous gestures in films that get clipped out and become a kind of cultural touchstone because they do something and you're trying to do that too …

To me what you've just described that process is very similar to something that, when I write a book review or a piece of criticism, I'm also trying to do. And so there is a way in which, as a book designer, you're kind of also placed at the interface between the creative and the critical. And that one of the things that a book cover does, is it's not just an advertisement, it's also a form of translation, it's also a kind of critical commentary or offers up a form of portraiture almost … Do you see yourself as doing that kind of thing?

I have thought all of those things, but it always sounds so pretentious! I'm a book designer. I'm not doing all these things, but it is true. That said, all those things are best left unsaid. It may be there for a very smart kind of literary critic like yourself to pick apart, but I think people should just go, ‘Oh!’ and it should just make some maybe inarticulable sense that comes from just looking [at the design].

I guess the reason why I brought this up is because you have done criticism, you have written reviews of exhibitions and appreciations of artists. On your Instagram, there are appreciative notes on people such as Ken Whisson, for instance. And it seems to me that this is something that comes quite naturally to you—there's a lot of élan and spontaneity about them. How do you feel about adopting that position as a critic, as a responder, rather than just a maker? And how much does it also feed back into that side of you that creates?

I think thinking about it that way is [a way of] compartmentalisation, but doing stuff is not compartmentalisation. It just happens that you're doing this kind of thing one moment and another kind of thing [the next]. It's kind of an existential thing. It's so hard to say any of this stuff without sounding portentous or pretentious.

I like the idea of doing this stuff because, as Neil Young says, you cannot be embarrassed because you’ll never do anything and you just have to decide what’s interesting [to you]. And there will be other people who are interested in this stuff, in the way that you're interested in their stuff, and you just have to do stuff and talk about stuff and share things because [otherwise] what else are you going to do? Are you going to wait to be translated into a heavenly realm? But if you are here and you have no certainty of anything being right or wrong, why not just do the thing that feels like something true to you at [any given] moment? Because you don't know anything. I don't know anything, certainly … you just have to think, ‘Wow, this feels good.’ I think other people would be interested in it … but just talking about it sounds stupid.

I'm very happy to write something about Ken Whisson, because I love his stuff and it's meant things to me, and I'm happy to share that. No matter what it means to anybody else—I don't know whether it will, I don't know whether anybody else will think it's right or wrong or good or bad—I have committed to the idea that I want to just say something, because he's given me something and I want to echo it back out there (whatever’s out there) and then I draw the line, and then whatever happens, happens. Then I don't have to be responsible for stuff.

How do you feel about writing? Is it something that you do regularly for yourself?

I feel it's very natural. I am almost reluctant to say this because that sounds pretentious. I'm not a writer, but I do write, so does that mean I'm a writer? I'm a writer when I'm writing. I have written poetry, but does that mean I'm a poet? I do remember somebody I used to know and she was doing whatever she was doing then. And then some years later I bumped into her and I said, ‘What are you doing now?’ And she said, ‘I'm a poet.’ I think it just sounds weird. I think you can say you're a doctor. You can say you're a professor. You can say, ‘I'm a gardener.’ But saying you're an artist or a poet or even like a novelist is … I don't know. I don't think the ground is so firm under that. Very often I've heard this from any number of writers, I've certainly read this about many artists, after they do something (is it ‘kenosis’?), they've emptied themselves into the thing. They feel they can't write another book. I’ve heard Michelle de Kretser say this—‘I don't know if I'll ever write another book’—because she's given it all away. Are you a prospective novelist if you’ve got nothing happening in your word processor at the moment? I mean, are you a novelist then? Because if I'm a doctor, I'm going to the clinic the next day. I guess I'm an artist at the end of the day; there's something on the wall. It's weird.

I think I understand. I've always been suspicious of people who are too ready to claim that identity, because there's always the danger of constructing some kind of false idol if you embrace that self-image too readily, or at the wrong time. So when I was a graduate student, there were a lot of other graduate students who were like, ‘Oh, I'm a writer as well.’ And then you'd read their writing, and it was actually less interesting than their scholarship. And I think part of it was because that idea was so fuzzy. And maybe that fuzziness is what strikes you as being weird, but also strikes me as containing a kind of danger because it removes them—not everyone, but some people—from the discipline that a more concrete attachment to or engagement with craft entails. Maybe that's not very fair.

Well, it replaces the verb with the noun. I can’t count the number of times I’ve come across people who come into publishing and say, ‘I want to be a writer’. I mean, you must have heard it yourself many times too. Well, [I say] go and fucking write. And if you do have that thing in mind, that ‘I am this’ instead of ‘I'm doing this’ or ‘I'm going to do this’, ‘I'm doing this tomorrow, and I'm finishing this, and I'm going to start selling tomorrow’, [you end up with] that rather tragic term: ‘practise’—my practise, blah, blah, blah. Just getting to the point where it's as much a cliché, really. Richard Diebenkorn says—I can't think of a better model for being a verb sort of artist than Diebenkorn: ‘It was trial and error, and it still is’. No matter how accomplished he is, how many things he’s done … he’s like, the next day is the next day, and we go through it again.

[So] it's a difference between thinking about making and thinking you're a maker? You can probably think that you're a maker in the context of a cocktail party and you're talking about stuff, but then you have to go and do the making and who knows how you make things, anyway? So I have this line which I very occasionally say to people, ‘I can design in my sleep’. Which is, I find, quite enjoyably obnoxious, because people usually think to themselves, ‘What the fuck?’ And what I mean is that I read the manuscript, you're tossing around for the idea, whatever it is. But that's when it comes. It's 3:00 am, you're half-awake, half-asleep, you don't know what you are. And this thing, your relaxed brain says, ‘Why don’t you try this?’ [But] I won't write it down, because if I remember it in the morning, it will be a strong enough notion. And then either it’s shit or it’s a door [to something else]. That's actually when my best ideas come: when I’m almost asleep, almost awake, and then I’m the maker, making.

So you read the entire manuscript? Is this for every book?

Every fiction book.

And how much consultation is there with the author and/or publisher?

So my line is I never talk to the author. It’s not helpful for anyone. I think it's the way I've always operated. Different publishers work different ways, of course. Text is a very editorial-oriented publisher, so my connection to the author is through the editor. So that is the line [for me], and between that there’s obviously the publisher, and the marketing people, etc. It's quite a rigorous process to get a cover approved; it means you’ve ticked off like, twenty boxes—twelve boxes at least, twelve different individual people’s boxes, including the author’s.

How long does that take—the whole process, from its initial conception in your half-conscious state to the approval?

There's really no standard amount of time. But we always give it a handy number of months. If you are very efficient, you can do it in a month, but I’d prefer to have three months. Not that I'm working on it all the time, but you have to allow for lots of room because everybody's working on different things. And you need to get everybody's attention along the way before you get to the author who might then wonderfully agree or less helpfully disagree, as I have recently experienced when the last thing I did went back to the author like, three, maybe four times? After that, it went through versions of the process in-house three times. So this all takes time and you have to allow time for your own frustrations to dissipate. I actually don't have that sense of annoyance anymore because you can't afford to. You have to be professional about it.

One of the imprints you work on, Text Classics, is animated by a very explicit attempt to redress the lack of institutional support for Australian literature both in publishing but also in, say, higher education. Do you feel any personal attachment to this mission of cultural preservation? And more broadly, how important is tradition (however you want to take the word) to your work?

I didn’t grow up with Australian literature. I grew up reading—and Robert Dessaix and Michelle de Kretser would delight in me saying this—I grew up reading Enid Blyton and Harold Robbins …

I don’t know who that is …

Look up Harold Robbins. What was that title? A Stone for Danny Rose [A Stone for Danny Fisher] or something like that. So Harold Robbins was, in his day, an extraordinarily popular author of potboiler sex-and-drama novels that went for 600 pages (and where I read my first description of ‘golden showers’). And that was because they were sitting on my father's bookcase which was how I got to read very naughty things like that. I also read Arthur Hailey, because my father had his books in his library—Roots—and James Clavell—Shogun and stuff. So I read big old-fashioned potboiler bestsellers and children’s books from a very particular … I'm guessing that Enid Blyton is sort of for middle-class, upper-middle-class English [readers]? It's a very peculiar kind of thing to grow up reading as a frame for the world. There were so many things in the books that I had no reference point for.

Anyway, so I have no investment in Australian literature as such. But I am very shocked at the level of cultural amnesia here. For example—and this happened recently about three weeks ago—an architect called Allan Powell died. He was a very significant Melbourne architect of extremely refined, modernist domestic houses, but also the TarraWarra gallery. There hasn’t been an obituary or anything else written about him [since his death] in the mainstream press. He was a significant architect in this town. And we just forget. We just do not respect and we do not try and build on the last stone. So you get a pile of stones. Typically, you see that Melbourne is just tearing up all architecture all the time. We would have the most wonderful top end of Collins Street if they hadn't started pulling down all that stuff. We had the most beautiful Bourke Street streetscapes and we tore down all that stuff. We go to London, and we think, ‘Oh my god, look at these streets!’ But we had them. And we tore them down. I don't know. Why are we so bad at this? Why are we callous—and careless? Why is everything so short-term? It's shocking. It's actually quite distressing, I think. It’s not like anyone has a deep culture here to hang on to, unless you’re Indigenous.

How do you go about creating a sense of cultural memory without also instilling a kind of parochialism?

How have other places managed it? It's not like we are pioneers or anything. We can always look to how it’s been done elsewhere. So one excellent example [off the top of my head] is when you have a long cultural tradition of respecting something, such as education. So you have to begin with something that allows you to slot these things in. And maybe it does have to do with a kind of disposable culture, or [it could be related to] Australia being the British dumping ground for convicts. Why are we so rootless? I don't know. Maybe we just haven't been here long enough. Except for the people who have been here long enough, and who have their own troubles with the people like us who haven't been here long enough.

Is your painting rooted?

Well, my own work is my self-rooting as it were! And that seems to me what a lot of art- making is about. I'm sure it's true for a whole lot of poets—trying to excavate, going down in order to go up. [I can think of] one of my favourite painters, Philip Guston, who, towards the end of his life, he was just digging and scraping around the hole he was standing in. Incredible. But then you have other ways of doing it, too, of course, other mindsets. Beckett was digging a hole in the air. He wasn't talking about Irishness anymore. He was thinking about humanness or the lack of it. So it's like, what do you need? All you know is what you're doing right then and there, or [it’s about moving on to] the next thing. You don't know what you need until you have to get there. Otherwise you'd be writing the same poem, you'd be making the same tune. And a lot of people do that. They paint the same damn thing over and over again. What's that about? It’s a problem for abstract artists. Yeah, that's fighting words. But I think that's true. Come and fight me!

Do you have any advice for emerging or aspiring book designers?

Go to a bookshop, pick out books that you like the look of, and see if you can guess why they look the way they do and why you think you like them. That would be one way to get a grip on your own taste and sensibility.

The great Milton Glaser (an artist who was also a designer; he studied with Giorgio Morandi and conceived the ‘I ❤️ NY’ symbol), who died last year, once said that when he taught design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, that he never worried about the technical aspect. He said [something like], I just tried to find out what the student was obsessed by, and I set them off along the path and they would find out what they needed to make the thing. And that seems to make sense to me.

Who are you inspired by?

Milton Glaser.

What are you listening to?

The David Chang podcast. The Coode Street podcast—they talk about science fiction. The Slate Culture Gabfest podcast, though I admit I'm maybe not wanting to listen to them much more. I have a whole list of podcasts I listen to, because I find it useful to work while listening: The Rest is Politics; Jess Ho’s Bad Taste; Filmspotting; 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s. Also, Time to Say Goodbye, an Asian-American podcast I argue with a lot. I find that it switches off some bit of my brain, whereas music [doesn’t] … I get into the music and then it screws me around.

What are you reading right now?

My reading is very problematic because I go through jags. If I'm not reading a manuscript, I have to be really in the mood to read fiction because I just don't want to think about fiction anymore. For instance, I'm currently trying to read Patrick Gale’s Mother’s Boy, but I keep getting distracted.

So one thing I'm reading a lot at the moment is bits of poetry. It’s a mess—I go through a whole lot of different things. I think I actually do prefer to read contemporary stuff, and contemporary stuff is among the stuff I understand the least.

How do you practice self care?

I walk the dogs in the morning.

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

Still working on the answer.