The Book
Artist Publication
2026
200 x 260 mm
124 p.
English
Swiss Bound Softcover
First Edition: 100
ISBN: 979-8-9953235-0-1
i) Introduction
Boulevard, The Word We Got Used To is an artist publication investigating how urban granules acquire personal meaning and bridge autobiographical recollection when a newcomer recognizes in it a literal correspondence with a memory from elsewhere.Without a car, I walked the notoriously un-walkable city of Los Angeles daily during my first year of stay in 2024, reading the city through whatever it offered on sidewalks, which, most consistently, were street numbers — the smallest, most indifferent facts a city produces. Then throughout 2025, I began a documentary photographic series on nearly every street address plaque along Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles County, assembling a continuous horizontal sequence that runs numerically from east to west. In early 2026, I created an spatial installation with the sequence across the walls of a vacant apartment in Liaoyang, China, then made photography prints of the installation as an encounter between the two geographies.
The final publication interleaves the Wilshire Boulevard sequence, installation photographs, and an essay on wandering and anchoring past memories to new places. This structure treats documentary photography, recontextualized installation, and essayistic writing as parallel modes of knowing; they are intended to insert discontinuity in reading and itself carry the work’s argument about how disparate geographical traits are assembled through media.
The book initiated my ongoing research framework, My Geography, examining how geospatial relations under repeated migration shape autobiographical remembering. The address plaque became the project’s model of a Perception Anchor, the term I coined for such urban granules, which I later extended through the web-based project Perception Anchor, allowing users to attach their episodic memories to shared urban records.
I created and designed the book, publishing an experimental edition of 100 under the independent imprint, possibly probably perhaps.
ii) In Circulation
Boulevard The Word We Got Used was acquired by the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) in 2026. Link to the archive page. Buy the book at Bungee.space, New York City.
iii) Credits
© Kristopher Yizhen Shi, 2026Book Design, Texts, Photography by Kristopher Yizhen Shi
Published by possibly probably perhaps, Los Angeles
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