Love in the Time of Borderline

A — INSPIRATION AND RESEARCH

A book for people with borderline personality disorder. In China it often goes undiagnosed and untreated — I made this to say something myself, and so that you know you are not the only one.

BPD runs on unstable relationships, a distorted sense of self, and emotional reactions that will not come back down to a baseline. Someone described it as moving through the world without skin.

Reference literature

• Get Me Out of Here
• Sometimes I Act Crazy
• Understanding the Borderline Mother
• The Buddha and the Borderline

On-screen

• Actress Winona Ryder as Suzanne in Girl, Interrupted
• Matsuko in Memories of Matsuko
• Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

B — MOODBOARD

MY MOST OF FILES MISSING …..

C — PHOTOGRAPHY

Taken during lockdown, around my neighbourhood and the old downtown. My friend and I were in the same quiet, heavy state. On impulse I walked barefoot across a construction site — cold rising from the ground, roughness, hardness underfoot. A brief, hard connection with something real.

D — STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Three sections, each a different size inside a single A4 frame.

The first is first-person: photographs, drawings and a little text, images linked to each other so the whole reads as montage. The second is direct — characteristics, causes, symptoms, co-morbidities. The third is for finding treatment and judging whether it fits.

Saddle-stitched, on vintage special paper, for the archival feel.

E — PRINT (BOOK DESIGN)

Part One follows Rinko Kawauchi, who finds the connection between things that have nothing to do with each other. Lovers’ hands bound in red thread read as parasitic trees — dependent, and slowly draining one another.

Part Two is typographic: free composition and custom type inside a modular grid, archival in feel, held between structure and spontaneity.

Part Three is information design. The emotional narrative turns into a rational system, and the reader is guided rather than immersed.