Description:

where am I is a bilingual zine exploring perceptual estrangement through poetic visual rhythm and typographic nuance. The project emerged from a shared feeling of quiet dislocation, an emotional state familiar to those navigating unfamiliar cultural environments.

The photographic source material was created by Carmen, a newly arrived international student in Melbourne, who turned to black-and-white film as a way to process the early stages of cultural adjustment. Her images—fragments and glimpses of space, overlooked vegetation—capture not events, but atmospheres. As creative director and designer, I was drawn to how these images noticed the unnoticed. They recalled to me the way plants appear in cities: growing, withering, and re-emerging in liminal spaces, without a clear origin or destination. The plants themselves are not depicted, but the metaphor emerged as I studied the images. It became a frame through which to approach dislocation not as an identity but as a condition.

My own experience relocating to Melbourne, following a year of remote study, echoed Carmen’s sense of perceptual drift. To attune myself to the logic of her gaze, I retraced the physical routes she walked and listened to the music she played while shooting. These were not referential exercises. They were ways of inhabiting the emotional temperature of the images. The book’s lowercase title, where am I, was chosen to retain openness. It is not a statement but a gentle question, one that remains unresolved and quietly personal.

The zine follows an anti-narrative structure. There is no beginning, climax, or resolution. Instead, it moves in a stream-of-consciousness rhythm where sequences are guided by mood, resonance, and emotional weight. Small images require focused attention. Full-bleed pages invite immersion. Typography was treated as a co-author of meaning. English and Chinese texts appear side by side, not as translations but as coexisting registers of experience. Font weights and styles were chosen based on emotional tone rather than function. Some lines drift across the page like water or vines. In later sections, legibility is deliberately reduced, inviting the viewer to slow down and dwell inside the pace of looking.

The zine was printed on lightweight stock and saddle-stitched to preserve a sense of breath and informality. Rather than being treated as a closed artefact, the object was approached as a living system: part architecture, part weather, part memory.

where am I contributes to broader conversations about belonging, perception, and multilingual expression. Socially, it reframes cultural displacement not as spectacle but as a shared undercurrent. Culturally, it challenges editorial norms by treating language not as label but as cohabitation. Through its poetic rhythm and typographic ambiguity, the zine offers a quieter design language that holds space for uncertainty, for nuance, and for the complexity of in-between states.