For Gen-Xers and the whole crew born before them, the internet obviously wasn't an available platform for broadcasting self-indulgent thoughts, nor was mediocre smartphone photography a tool for publicising their lives the way it is for today's young generation. Nevertheless, people who weren't literary luminaries or sought-after artists still expressed themselves, and did so through fanzines _ "zines" for short.
A term used to describe unprofessional magazines, these amateur pursuits were easily made using photocopy machines back in the day _ thus giving complete immediacy and freedom regarding creativity to the creator.
Since 1970, zines have been the subject of substantial exhibitions organised by artists and figures in the creative fields in New York. Decades later, ubies, an international network of creatives which started in Japan, brought the idea over to this part of the world.
"Here Is ZINE Tokyo" started in 2010 and has been through six exhibitions in Japan before arriving with the seventh one on our own shores, after Practical Design Studio got acquainted and decided to collaborate with Hiro Sugiyama, a curator of zine events in Japan.
Surely to be appreciated by both book lovers and art connoisseurs, "Here is ZINE 7th Bangkok-Tokyo" is a neat line of snappy zines _ all varying in shape, design, colour and size _ displayed on the wooden-surfaced bars in the centre of the next to NORMAL store in CentralWorld. Thirty-eight artists from Japan and Thailand are showcased, with some home-grown celebrity artists and design VIPs such as Pod Modern Dog, Greyhound creative director Jitsing Somboon and Yuree Kensaku and May-T Noijinda also in the mix.
Put simply, a flip through each zine is a step into someone else's private space: mostly a lot of random stuff all over the place with slight undertones of ingenuity and visual aptitude that bind it all together. A quite a few have no chronological sense whatsoever and whether you'll like what you see or not will depend on your tastes and current mood.
Perhaps that's what makes a zine fun to flip through _ with its unpredictable content in unexpected forms, it is a refreshing immersion and a nice change from the typical magazines you might usually sink your teeth into.
Ranging from the use of kooky and offbeat graphics, vintage illustrations, intricate paper cuts to stunning black-and-white photography, the zines on display embody a large array of subjects, be it cute dogs, soft porn, Japanese pop culture or a history of Isan music among countless other fascinating ideas projected onto paper through visuals.
All of the zines on display are limited edition and don't expect this affair to offer anything cheap as prices for these zines start at 500 baht and go up all the way to, gulp, 167,000 baht. Yuree Kensaku and May-T Noijinda's original artbook is one among those with hefty price tags, with each copy selling for 8,500 baht.
"The prices for these zines seem high because they were created by digital printing, where every colour comes out at the same time and is more costly than offset printing where four plates of different colours print one at a time," explains Yuree.
"The quality is very high and it's valuable in the sense that it's something special that artists only make once in a long while."
But price aside, the spirit of a zine has always been to share an idea in your head so strong that it must be shared with the world immediately. For Yuree, who is famed for her large and bold paintings, working with zines is a new, fun platform which required less thematic direction, blueprinting and no rules of composition that paintings are otherwise chained to.
"It feels much less serious than my other artwork because the scale is much smaller and it's all done on paper," she says. "Nevertheless, it has been a really fun experience because you can just do whatever you want immediately and just print it out without even having to use a high quality printer."
Don't forget to take good care of your zines (so they keep their worth after all the big baht you've spent!) by not rumpling the pages and storing them in a dry place _ preferably a box at room temperature to delay ageing and yellowing. If you've seen enough zines, why not try your hand at grouping all the ideas and things you love into a zine yourself?
Imagine what total Armageddon it would be if Pinterest or Instagram crashed or shut down one day _ I'm sure we agree that nothing beats having a physical copy of something meaningful to hold on to that can really warm your hands with its presence.
Here Is ZINE 7th Bangkok-Tokyo is on show at next to NORMAL, 1st floor, CentralWorld, until Nov 21. Limited editions of zines by various artists from Thailand and Japan will be on sale.
