The Unfinished House

For his twenty-fifth year of bookmaking, Theseus Chan takes a restored Sri Lankan house and, with considerable care, leaves it in pieces.

WERK No. 34 marks a quarter-century of Theseus Chan's magazine, and finds him doing what he has always done best: treating the book not as a container for content but as an object in its own right, made to be handled rather than merely read. This issue takes its cue from Doornberg, the house on Richmond Hill in Galle whose foundations reach back to 1712, and reads it the way the cover promises, as "an excavation through image, script and structure".

What results is printed matter as excavation, unpolished and unfinished by design, and unfinished by name too: Chan releases it as a pair, No. 34 "Doornberg 1712" alongside its companion No. 35 "Unfinished Work", catalogued together as WERK Magazine 25A. The house is not restored on the page so much as overheard. History, art, climate, decay and repair are left to coexist much as they do behind the walls, with selected works from the collection of Saskia Fernando set beside photography by Domenic Sansoni and Sebastian Posingis, and script documentation by Pathum Egodawatta. Moving between image and structure, the book resists resolution on principle, keeping its fragments open and inviting the reader to wander rather than to conclude.

The making matches the thinking. The covers arrive in five hand-finished colourways, blue, green, orange, red and yellow, each one screen-pulled and paint-streaked so that no two copies are quite alike, and a small parallel run of printed cloths, T-shirts and totes was photographed in situ at Doornberg itself, the object reunited with its origin on the same washing line. Launched at Dover Street Market, London and Tokyo.

"An excavation through image, script and structure", the issue features work from the collection of Saskia Fernando, photography by Domenic Sansoni and Sebastian Posingis, and script documentation by Pathum Egodawatta

Theseus Chan

Theseus Chan is a Singaporean graphic designer and publisher, and the founder of the creative agency WORK. His collaborators include Rei Kawakubo and Gerhard Steidl, partnerships that have yielded work with Comme des Garçons and the much-admired STEIDL-WERK series. He was the only international artist commissioned to create official artworks for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, alongside sixteen Japanese artists, and is widely held to be among the most influential figures in contemporary graphic design and experimental publishing.

He is best known internationally for WERK itself, the self-published graphic arts magazine he launched in 2000 as a place to explore print, materials and production techniques unencumbered by the demands of commercial clients. Each issue is conceived afresh as a singular physical object: less a publication, more an experiment that happens to arrive in print.

A basenote.

For those wondering what, exactly, Chan was excavating: Doornberg is a real house, and a private one. Four oversized rooms stand sentinel on Richmond Hill in Galle, the Indian Ocean below and the UNESCO-listed Fort a twenty-minute walk down the slope, with an acre of tropical garden at the foot of the veranda. A retired Dutch admiral built it in 1712, after which it did what old houses do, weathering grandeur, neglect and reinvention in turn, until its present custodian, the Australian-born Peter Harris, took it on in 2021, termites and all. What followed is the very work the magazine takes as its subject: roofs stripped and beams replaced, 23,000 terracotta tiles sourced from an old Dutch church north of Negombo, door frames sanded and refitted by hand. The house Harris recovered is elegant and gallery-hushed, hung with Hema Shironi and settled into the calm of Carl Hansen and mid-century Danish design. The house Chan made is none of those things, and that is rather the point. Where the custodian made it whole, WERK keeps it open, and between the two sits everything the issue is interested in: that decay and repair are not opposites but long-standing housemates, and have kept each other company at Doornberg for three hundred years.

WERK No. 34, titled "Doornberg 1712", is the twenty-fifth-anniversary issue of Theseus Chan's experimental graphic arts magazine, first published in 2000. It takes as its subject Doornberg, a house built in 1712 on Richmond Hill in Galle, Sri Lanka, and restored by its present custodian, Peter Harris. Described on its cover as "an excavation through image, script and structure", the issue features work from the collection of Saskia Fernando, photography by Domenic Sansoni and Sebastian Posingis, and script documentation by Pathum Egodawatta. It was released alongside companion issue No. 35, "Unfinished Work", in five hand-finished colourways, and launched at Dover Street Market in London and Tokyo.