Radical moves are afoot in Beijing with the launch of China’s first “Outsider art reading room”, known as the Almost Art Library, last month. Starting with more than 50 titles from China, Japan and the West, the 30 sq. m library is dedicated to untrained, self-taught artists. Catering for six visitors at a time, it is “basically like a living-room size”, says Sammi Liu, the former deputy editor of The Art Newspaper China, who founded the Almost Art Project in 2015. The library, which is inside Liu’s gallery Tabula Rasa, is attracting around 40 people a day, mainly high-school students and undergraduates from art universities in Beijing, Liu says. Almost Art, which holds an annual “guerrilla art festival”, aimed to “include research, publications and public talks since the very beginning”, she adds.
