Taking a page from tradition

The goal is to create a three-dimensional dialogue between a reader's senses and the book.

"You can smell the paper, touch and feel it, all of which can be part of your reading experience," he says.

It's the idea of integrating the shape of a book into its content that drove Zhang to design, in dragon-scale binding, Dream of the Red Chamber, a classic novel by Cao Xueqin during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The book runs to more than 100 meters in length and sits more than a meter high when closed. It has 120 chapters with re-creations of 230 images by the Qing Dynasty painter Sun Wen.

As his experience grows, Zhang further explores the possibility of this unique expression, and has developed his own Infinite Leaves series. The superposition of pages builds a multidimensional world, attaching a new spatial meaning to the traditional bookbinding technique.

His new works take the form of unique "paper sculptures", and shift to a more abstract visual language. These works appear more mysterious under light, thanks to the casting of shadows, as when viewed from multiple angles, there appear Buddha statues and subtle landscapes.