Join us for a book launch on occasion of the release of Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s Property Journal, published by Book Works. Ching-Yan Lam will be joined in conversation by project designer Rosen Eveleigh.

From December 2021 to December 2022, artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam kept a record of each time real estate, property or housing came up in conversation. She called this the Property Journal. Over the course of a year, neighborhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mold appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturizer; as property organizes people’s lives, it also overtakes them. What began as a simple framework soon becomes an index of precarity, told through the indignities, dread, and dreamscapes of what we’re able to call ‘home’. Property Journal stands as a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis.

Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. Her work approaches histories, personal and communal, via intuition and necessity. Exhibitions and performances have been presented at Seoul MediaCity Biennale, South Korea; Western Front, Canada; Eastside Projects, United Kingdom; and numerous DIY venues. She is the author of Baby Book (2023), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry; Looty Goes to Heaven (2022); and Property Journal (2024). From 2006–2020, she was part of the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She was born in Hong Kong and lives in Tkaronto/Toronto.

Rosen Eveleigh is a designer and researcher working independently or with artists, archives, editors, cultural institutions and publishers to produce graphic identities, typefaces, websites, texts, lectures, books and other works. They are interested in the historic and methodological relationship between graphic design and queer culture. Alongside their practice they teach on the MA Graphic Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts.