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爱玛 Aima

@aimafan_

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NICOTINE EDEN

a [FEVER] project

Self-published July 2026
10.8 × 17.8 cm, numbered edition of 15
Butterfly binding (lay-flat), softcover
250gsm soft-touch laminated cover
140gsm premium art paper inner pages

Text & design & basically everything else by Aima Fan
Limited copies available for purchase via dm <3

#selfpublishing
#artistsbooks
#visualpoetry
@rca_contemporaryartpractice by @aimafan_

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2 days ago

It gets really complicated when it crashed and burned in the worst way possible but it was also kinda hot so you have to make a book about it and of course Anaïs Nin has to be involved

Scans from my visual poetry delirium Nicotine Eden / the first book of my self publishing project [FEVER]

#selfpublishing
#artistsbooks
#nicotineeden
#anaïsnin by @aimafan_

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5 days ago

My book is real and alive now.

I cannot express how disorienting it is to feel this much joy and pride in myself after two months of genuinely debilitating emotional hell that probably scarred me and my concept of love forever — but after all, the process of creating is analogous to pregnancy, and pregnancies are painful, sometimes lethal. The baby, on the other hand, is the golden redeemer. By baby I mean the book; by the book I mean Nicotine Eden.
Nicotine Eden is a book of visual poetry, with texts written during and immediately after the dissolution of an affair. In the first few pages, she is delusional in the best way — ecstatic, brave, manic, practically desire itself given a tongue. Then the critic steps in, dismantling the all-consuming romantic vision, if not the lyrical tradition of poetry itself, with quippy corrections, undercutting annotations, and authoritative performance directions, exposing the brutality hidden beneath the scaffolding of Eden. The deconstruction of the text mirrors the deconstruction of the relationship, while echoing Man's expulsion from Eden after eating the fruit of knowledge. In the visual design, I often erred on the side of the risqué and the evocative: images of my own body, images and songs actually exchanged in our texts, the interior of the house where the "real" story happened. Conceptually, it is a question of the boundary between reality and fiction — whether it exists at all when one is in an altered state of consciousness, like being in love. The psychedelic effect of infatuation makes everyone's narrative unreliable. But here is one narrative that is at least beautiful, and that is where the poetry in this book lives.
I'd like to thank all the friends I bothered to read the 4th/9th/13th/20th version of this book. You gave me valuable insight and encouragement to push the project forward when I was in literal hell, mentally. To Aaron, who made sure I was fed and clean and asleep when I needed to be, when I couldn't do anything but feverishly write/design the book and cry. And to the elusive older gentleman — one date — who told me to get EMDR (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to physically make this at all) by @aimafan_

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11 days ago

34 reasons I am so obsessed with you
In riso

#riso #risography by @aimafan_

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4 days ago

34 reasons I am so obsessed with you

Some ruminations and fantasies and pledging allegiance to the flag

@rca_contemporaryartpractice

#risograph #riso #risography #concretepoetry by @aimafan_

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4 days ago

detail scan of Nicotine Eden
my visual poetry delirium /the first book under the self-publishing project [FEVER]

The eye reappears in the book as a central motif. There's definitely something to be found out if you stare at it long enough and try to figure out exactly what the eye was seeing...

thank you @anubhav.deka for showing me how to use a digital scanner

#selfpublishing #artistsbooks #nicotineeden by @aimafan_

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5 days ago

Posting with my book & my leg

#artistsbooks by @aimafan_

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9 days ago

1. A poem I wrote today at the writing workshop @forma.hq x @montezpress led by @youarehasti
2. Slow Crush by Jala Wahid (back side)
3. A section of Souls on the Banks of the Acheron by Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, 1898 taken in London, England by @aimafan_

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12 days ago

34 reasons I am so obsessed with you

(to win, to sleep no more!)
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I am starry eyed, misty eyed, insane, and alive.
This might become a poster if people want it

(TW: mentioning of k*ll*ng y**rself) by @aimafan_

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18 days ago

Portrait at the RCA 2026 School of Arts and Humanities Degree Show

photo by @neelanchalhere by @aimafan_

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19 days ago

(continued)

In a degree show, the default relation between the artwork and the viewer is seduction: the work is lit, labelled, raised on a plinth, and the institution spends its attention convincing you that what you are looking at is worth looking at, in a tone meant to be taken more seriously than other tones. I built a piece that opts out of this. The art is deliberately small, anonymous, unassuming, easy to miss. The relation it offers is not seduction but partial resistance — partial, so as not to collapse into either blatant literalism or pure withholding. I wanted the objects to do the talking, in an ante-verbal symbolic language, rather than have a wall text tell you what they are and why they matter. This is the through-line of the whole project: institutional critique that refuses the spectacle it is criticising.

A work that cannot exist unless other people agree to shelter it is a work about hospitality, hierarchy, and who is permitted to take up space. This is where I should situate the project. The performed tour-guide owes something to Andrea Fraser's gallery talks, and the guided walk to Janet Cardiff's audio works.

But the reference I was metabolising most deeply is the Museum of American Art in Berlin — an authorless museum that critiques by withholding the seductive original, presenting only the deadpan apparatus of display with no charismatic artist standing behind it. My objects make the same move one scale down. What I wanted, though, was to reverse its premise. The Museum of American Art runs on the copy, the reproduction, the reproduction of the copy— the thing with no original. Mine runs on the opposite: the wretched ready-mades, apparently undeserving of the museum treatment. I reverse the form of the institutional fiction to fill the most un-copyable objects I could find.

(to be continued)

Photo courtesy of @bowentang_uk

If you do not wish to appear photographically in this post please contact me !!

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Documentation of A GUIDED WALKING TOUR IN PORTLAND, OR
@rca_contemporaryartpractice taken in Royal College of Art by @aimafan_

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20 days ago

A Walk In Portland, OR (A WALKING GUIDE) is my degree show project for my MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art.

The project consists of 7 installations and a pamphlet. It is myth-making about the city of Portland, Oregon. It is a curatorial take-over. It is also an object poem about the experience of homelessness, and the spatial politics therein.

2 months prior to the degree show I travelled to Portland to acquire my found objects in antique stores and second hand markets, among my finds was also the first edition signed copy of Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon by Chuck Palahniuk. I salvaged quotes and footnotes from the book and collected them in the pamphlet, as I curated and painted the found objects and composed them in seven groupings of installations.

In the past 3 years, I was able to glimpse into the conditions of homelessness in Portland Oregon in the aftermath of COVID, and more specifically through talking with my friend Ivory and listening to her stories, who inspired this project fundamentally. She used to always talk about her antique collection before she lost her house and began to live in her car. With the container lost, a person's objects also become homeless.

In this project, each object in the installation must “seeks shelter” from other artworks installed in the exhibition due to the lack of designated space for themselves. The arrangements were negotiated between artists, administrators, and the campus estate. (List of artists who offered shelter for this work, in sequential order: Emile Brutus, Bijuca Balde @bijuca.balde , Siyuan (Sammi) Wu @sammi_mmmmm , Lingyi Zhang @00e.lynn , Xiaoyuan Ma @ma_xiao_yuan , Neelanchal Gupta @neelanchalhere , Yifei Wang @yifei_cdy , Scarlet Hope-Gates @modernart.sohg , Ruby Chen @ruby.ch3n , & Jesus Vasquez @bruh.cuh .) The location of each object is only indicated in the Walking Guide through a series of riddles and clues, without any official public record.

(to be continued)
Photo courtesy ：@bowentang_uk by @aimafan_

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22 days ago