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Over the past few years, I’ve made multiple trips on press to Shenzhen, China.

Press-checking, the overseeing of offset printing and production, is mundane work. Most of my time is spent waiting for printers to set up and calibrate press machines, often very late at night or early in the morning. It can take days to complete a press check and time is often spent alone.

When I travel on press, I’ll often sleep in a room at the factory or at a hotel close by. Recently, I’ve been working with a printer in Shenzhen named Artron, one of the most well-reputed printers in China. When on press there, I usually stay at the Seaview Gleetour Hotel or the Shenzhen Intercontinental where Artron has special rates. The Seaview Gleetour is the cheaper of the two and reminds me of many hotels in Southern China where rooms are slightly worn down and the smell of cigarettes lingers in upholstery. The Intercontinental is more upscale with rooms that feature a glass-walled shower situated near the middle of the room and a button that draws down a privacy shade. Artron Shenzhen is located in Overseas Chinese Town, or OCT, a counterintuitive name for an area designed for tourists. It includes a contemporary art museum, Japanese coffee shops, a Pizza Hut and an artificial lake.

Most mornings before press check, I’ll eat the complimentary hotel breakfast alone and check email on a bad mobile VPN connection. Frankfurt 1, Los Angeles 3, Tokyo 2. Usually none of the IP addresses can trick The Great Firewall and I’ll resign myself to a magazine and coffee from the automated espresso machine. Or I’ll observe the rest of the clientele. Most often it’s businessmen preparing for morning meetings or conversing with female travel companions. Breakfast at Seaview Gleetour is clamorous; the Intercontinental is more serene. This is the backdrop against which I have traveled to Shenzhen over the past few years.

A friend recently reminded me of the history of printing in China. After perusing the Internet, my bookmark folder is now full of links that paint a clearer picture of how early printing technologies were first developed by the Chinese. For example, ink, made from soot and animal glue, dating back to 256 BC and paper, dating back to 179 BC, were both discovered in China. The Chinese invented the earliest woodblock prints, printed on colored silk, in 220 BC, as well as the first book, “The Diamond Sutra,” in 868 AD. The first example of moveable type was printed Chinese currency in 1045 AD. And the introduction of ink, paper, printing and moveable type in China led to a technological push in printing around the world, including the Guttenberg press, modern thought, enlightenment and the scientific revolution.

I first started visiting Shenzhen over 20 years ago. For most of its history, Shenzhen was a small village on the border of Hong Kong until 1979, when it was designated a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), one of five cities in China that were opened up to foreign trade. The establishment of China’s SEZs coincided with the international rise of neoliberalism, promoting deregulation, automation, globalization and free trade. Since then, most of the world’s manufacturing has been relocated to China including the production of chemicals, materials, textiles, garments, machinery, automobiles, trains, ships, aircraft, electronics, telecommunications and information technology.

When I visited Shenzhen in the late 1990s, skies were coal gray, a few high rises were emerging and potholed streets were filled with Volkswagen Santanas, one of the first foreign cars manufactured in China. Recently, on a trip to the rural village of Fan Ling in Hong Kong, directly across the border from Shenzhen, the ultramodern Shenzhen skyline now illuminated the Hong Kong countryside.

Someone once told me that the farther south in China you travel, and the closer to Hong Kong you are, the wealthier the city. Concurrently, it seems that the farther south you travel, the better the quality of printing. On their website, Artron declares that it has produced over 300 million books and its corporate clients include Tencent and Huawei, the world’s largest social media and telecommunications companies in the world respectively, as well as Apple, Walmart, and Disney. Artron specializes in producing high quality books very quickly and in a single supply chain, the sequence of processes involved in the production and distribution of products.

Early on in my experience of working with Artron, I was in the process of bidding out a quotation with them when their responses started to become slower and slower. I later learned that half of the factory had been reserved for six months to print an Apple publication. On Apple’s online shop, the book, “Designed by Apple,” is described as chronicling 20 years of Apple, made with “specially milled German paper,” and costing $300 per copy. There is no mention that it was printed in China.

Over the years, I’ve worked with various printers in China and Hong Kong in industrial factories on the outskirts of cities. Many Chinese towns and satellite cities are often devoted to the production of singular items. For example, I once worked with a printer in a small town devoted only to printing at a factory that specialized in printing cigarette boxes. The factory conditions were dirty, workers and their familes all worked and lived on site and the town had a single road with a few restaurants and a mobile phone store with a fake Apple logo as its sign.

Thus, the first time I visited an Artron factory, I was shocked by how modern and clean the facilities were. I recently visited Artron Shenzhen and met up with Eric Wei, a senior production manager with whom I have worked with on various projects over the past few years. The factory is a sleek, purple, triangular volume designed by the Chinese architecture firm Urbanus. On that first visit, as I crossed the border from Hong Kong in Shenzhen, Wei, playing the combined role of production manager and guest services ambassador, WeChatted me.

Eric Wei: Hi Geoff, are you close by?
Geoff Han: I’m about 15 minutes away
Eric Wei: I will ask our driver to find a parking spot and wait for you at the exit door
Eric Wei: The car number is B 619SC
Eric Wei: It’s a silver Buick business purpose vehicle

Owned by Tencent and with over a billion users, WeChat is a Chinese messaging super app with features including calling, file sharing, voice messaging, ride-hailing, shopping, ordering for delivery, paying bills, transfering money, dating, gaming, booking medical appointments, and investing. The app plays a large role in Chinese enterprise and, naturally, for anyone working with Chinese printers. In my experience, printers like to use WeChat at all phases of the production process, from quoting a job, to production, to invoicing for payment. Project managers are constantly asking and fielding questions at all hours of the day and night.

After I’ve checked into my hotel room closeby to Artron, Wei messages me again.

Eric Wei: The car will arrive at your hotel in 20 minutes
Geoff Han: Ok thanks
Eric Wei: We have a coffee shop in Artron where we can meet
Eric Wei: They also serve noodles and steak there

Upon arrival at Artron, I’m escorted directly to the minimally-designed cafe, greeted by a stylishly-dressed attendant, and offered a menu of upscale Chinese or Western fare. Various luxury clients discuss projects with Artron managers over artisanal coffee. When summoned, I’m led down to the printing facilities for presscheck.

The internal workflow at Artron Shenzhen all takes place in one building: pre-press takes place on the third floor, printing on the first floor, and post-press on the second floor. Pre-press is comprised of color management, imposition, pagination, and the manufacturing of CTP printing plates – processes all completed before printing actually commences. As we walk through the third floor, the sound of hundreds of workers operating computers and performing various pre-press operations fills the floor. Managers mill around proofing tables, quality-controlling color and pagination documents. Visitors are not normally allowed into the pre-press facilities and as we enter the room, there is some chatter and workers steal glances at us.

In 2015, I began designing “Ran Dian,” a biannual magazine dedicated to contemporary Chinese art. I had designed a few magazines in the past but with “Ran Dian,” I was interested in exploring the potential of printing and production with Chinese commercial printers. The production constraints of printing in China are different than printing in Europe, North America and even Hong Kong. For example, in China, unconventional production techniques and hand collation, the manual sequencing of pages for binding, can be cheap while imported materials are expensive. Printing in China made me think about magazine design in an entirely different way.

The design of each issue responded to the issue’s theme through different production techniques. In Issue 6 of “Ran Dian,” which was themed “Live, Work, Play,” we worked with posterization, a mechanical image coloring technique in which information in a continuous-tone photograph is reduced and divided into multiple layers of single tones. The technique was often used in the 1970s for record cover album art, whisky advertisements, or silkscreened band posters and made a resurgence in the 1990s with the emergence of Photoshop’s posterize filter. For the issue, large artist images were posterized into various tonal structures, and the cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) inks used for standard color printing were replaced with various metallic and fluorescent inks to further exaggerate the posterization.

The production of magazines happens very quickly and without much room for error. With Issue 6 of “Ran Dian,” printing and post-press was reduced to three days. Multiple wetproofs, tests made on the offset press, had to be produced to test the posterization technique with different resolutions, sequences of color separations, and inks. The day before printing was to begin, a set of wet proofs were made overnight in China. As soon as they were printed, badly compressed cellphone photos of the tests were messaged to us over WeChat, and we had to make an immediate decision on them during New York daytime.

Because of The Wall, download speeds from Western servers slow to a crawl in China and can take days to complete. As a result, files often have to be sent to print through QQ, another Tencent-owned software which allows for large file-sharing, and can be downloaded in minutes by their pre-press department.

We exit the third floor and take the stairs down to the first floor of the building, entering the massive printing facilities. The smell of paper and ink permeates the air and workers are dressed in all-white uniforms. All of Artron’s 34 press machines are pristinely kept Japanese Komori presses, known to be slightly cheaper than the more common Heidelberg presses, specializing in printing fast-drying UV ink, and handling very thin paper.

Printing and press-checking at Artron happens unusually fast. “Our factories are open 24 hours. We have a day shift and a night shift, 7 days a week. Our presses are running every day and are never turned off,” says Wei as he navigates us through the field of press machines. “We have 13 offset press machines in Shenzhen, 8 in Shanghai, and 13 in Beijing. We set up two shifts of workers per machine. We also have a third shift that gives different shifts a rest each week.” He also tells me that workers receive paid incentives commensurate to the quantity of formes they are able to complete in an allotted time period. As a result, printing at Artron seems to happen faster than anywhere I’ve printed before.

Around the same time I started designing “Ran Dian,” I also began a monograph for SO–IL architects called “Solid Objectives: Order, Edge, Aura,” documenting the first ten years of their practice.

For the color photographs of the book, colored or foiled paper acts as a spot color in the image. I first thought of the idea after realizing that a lot of SO–IL’s work involved mirror. I imagined mirrored surfaces in a photograph of shared work space at the New Museum’s New Inc actually being reflective with the rest of the image being non-reflective. Or green paper coloring the leaves of a tree on site at Frieze New York. Working in collaboration with a lithographer, the spot colors of color photographs were masked so that the inverse area of the spot color was printed in white ink on colored or foiled paper. The remaining CMYK tonal values were then printed on top of the white ink. The result is a subtle, three-dimensional effect in which spot colors in photographs are manifested through colored paper.

I flew to Shenzhen to oversee the printing. Colored paper signatures were printed with fast-drying UV ink so the first layer of white ink would dry in time for the CMYK ink to print on top in a single pass. In the early results, the white ink did not mask the paper color enough. I asked the foreman to use more ink to make the effect more opaque. Over WeChat, I negotiated with Artron about the additional cost.

Eric Wei: Geoff, I just got a call from the foreman about an issue with the white ink
Eric Wei: The effect you want will take a lot of ink and will cost more
Geoff Han: Sorry, I don’t understand
Eric Wei: The price will increase for using more white ink to get the solid white
Eric Wei: They said the extra cost will be 1 RMB for each sheet
Eric Wei: [Loud cry emoji] [Loud cry emoji] [Loud cry emoji]
Geoff Han: How much does that work out to per book?
Eric Wei: There are 10 sheets in total per book
Eric Wei: So it will be 10 RMB more per copy
Eric Wei: Or around US$1.60

As it had already been a difficult process to get the client and publisher to agree on the price of printing, the news was frustrating

Geoff Han: I just talked to the client

Texting with one of the SO–IL partners, Ilias Papageorgiou, he suggested to negotiate with Artron to add more ink only to the colored pages which were proving to be the most translusent, and not to the foiled pages, to reduce the cost increase slightly.

Eric Wei: Sorry for the delay, our office Chinese New Year party just started
Geoff Han: How much is the cost increase for more white ink on the colored
paper only?
Eric Wei: US$0.60 per copy
Geoff Han: Ok, let’s do it

Since the 1990s, a popular tourist attraction in Shenzhen has been the spa resort. These resorts are family-friendly entertainment complexes complete with karaoke lounges, tv rooms, sit-down restaurants and hotel rooms. They often feel like casinos where gambling has been replaced by massage. Massages in Shenzhen are much cheaper than in Hong Kong, and resorts draw many Hong Kong tourists. Three hour massages from two or three masseurs at the same time are not uncommon. Spa resorts have multiple restaurants and visitors can stay overnight.

On a recent trip to Shenzhen, after a busy day at Artron, I visited a new spa resort called Water Cube Spa Palace near the port of Luo Hu, the most popular entry point into Hong Kong. The exterior facade of the five floor building is a giant logo for Water Cube Spa Palace animated in neon lights. On arrival, I’m greeted by a chorus of employees and immediately ushered into a changing room. An attendant helps me change out of my clothes, places them in my locker, then leads me to the shower area. Afterwards, the attendant is waiting for me once again and helps me change into a paisley-patterned outfit with brown slippers.

Emerging from the changing room, clothes soft against my clean skin, I enter a giant room with 50 masseuses greeting me in unison. Just behind them, a few customers receive massages on La-Z-Boy-like reclining chairs. Families lay around in their paisley outfits, relaxed and watching movies on flat screen TVs.

As I emerge from the changing room, I’m immediately led by one of the employees into a room and given a handheld device with photographs of different female masseurs, options for duration, kinds of massages and prices. Options included full body, half body, head, foot, lymphatic, and prostate. My massage lasts 90 minutes and afterwards, I quickly shower, change, pay, and head back to the hotel.

After the printing sheets have dried, they are sent up to the second floor for post-press work. Here is where any hand work, die-cutting, collation, binding and trimming occurs. On this floor, workers seem to be more abundant. Hundreds of laborers are involved in handwork or semi-automated tasks.

As more and more manufacturing has migrated to China in the last 20 years, there has been a greater demand for higher labor standards and wages. Inadvertently, the cost of printing has risen. “When printing with international clients, companies have to be very careful and follow the SA8000 labor standard for pay, working hours and safety,” says Wei when asked about labor conditions at Artron. “Because, in general, laborers age 40 to 50 want to earn more money, they want to work more overtime in violation of the SA8000 which we do not allow. While Artron’s pressmen’s salaries are very high, the handworkers are paid the minimum wage of 2600 RMB (US$ 377) per month.”

For Issue 4 of “Ran Dian,” we illustrated the theme of ‘happiness’ through different post-press techniques. After much testing, on the day before printing, we settled on die-cutting the Chinese character for double happiness out of the cover and section dividers. Die-cutting, a machine process of cutting shapes out of paper, was problematic due to an advertisement on the inside front cover that would be affected by the die cut and we had to negotiate with the publisher and gallery to move the advertisement to a different location.

The interior pages were also printed on one-side gold foiled paper which were then hand-collated in different ways for each section. Book pages are normally collated by a machine that has a maximum of 40 compartments that different signatures, groupings of printed and folded pages, are placed in. As a result, you can only switch signatures a maximum of 40 times in one pass through the collation machine and collating more than 40 paper switches increases cost significantly. In the first section, all gold-foil pages are bound so that they always appear on the left hand side of a double page spread; in the second section, they appear side by side as spreads; in the third section, they always apear on the right hand side of a spread; and in the fourth section, they appear side by side as spreads again but in a reverse sequence. Because of this custom collation, the paper switches orientation hundreds of times in each copy of the magazine, had to be done by hand and likely would not have been possible if produced elsewhere.

After books are bound and trimmed, they are sent to a climate-controlled room to be dehumidified for a period of two to four days. Following climate control, books are shrink-wrapped, packed and then either stored or shipped by sea or air. An advance copy of the first book I made with Artron was completely warped so that when viewed from its side, the foredge was concave. Most books at Artron are perfect-bound with Chinese PUR hot-melt glue or hardcover with Chinese case-binding glue. The glue contains water and Shenzhen’s humidity can cause significant warping problems when shipped to drier climates such as North America or Europe.

I suspect poor Chinese paper quality also has something to do with the issue. That said, over the past three years, I have noticed the cost and quality of local paper in China increasing as a result of improved environmental standards. Similar to the increased exposure of low Chinese labor standards, environmental awareness has been a topic of growing importance for the new Chinese middle class. In 2014, president Xu Jinping declared a “war on pollution,” improving environmental standards and enforcing strict penalties on abusers. “The government has increased environmental standards and is cracking down on the paper industry and deforestation,” says Wei. As a result, “paper cost is going up. Right now, local paper can be more expensive than paper imported from Japan or Europe.

Every year, an increasing number of museum, collection, biennial, exhibition and auction catalogs, artist books, monographs, anthologies, surveys, guides, manuals, readers, journals and magazines are printed in China. Before my interview with Wei at Artron Shenzhen, I emailed him questions related to Artron’s business model. At some point, he became evasive: “I think some of your questions are confidential and I can’t talk with you about them.” I told him that I was interested in providing more information about the Chinese printing industry to people outside of China which seemed to relax him. “I will share with you what I know,” he wrote.

Western publishers and practioners working with printers in China is a complex phenomenon. In addition to the exploitation of cheap labor and efficient supply chains, the Chinese paper, ink and printing industry also have a history of polluting water and air, mass deforestation, and producing excessive waste. Further, publishers and Chinese printers often self-censor content related to Tibet, Taiwan, the Tiananmen Square protests and the Falun Gong – known as “Three T’s and an F”– and more recently the Hong Kong protests, the persecution of Uighur Muslims, and critique of president Xi Jingpeng. If a publication has a local ISBN, all content must be submitted to a state publisher for review before printing; if a publication has a foreign ISBN, the publication of sensitive content can be punished with fines and delays. For example, “Ran Dian” has a foreign ISBN and a few images were not printed for fear of government censorship. “Censorship itself is complex, and happens in different ways,” says Daniel Ho, Editor in Chief of “Ran Dian”. “There are generally three levels of censorship in China: central, provincial and local, with central censorship being the most strict.”

On the other hand, labor and environmental standards have improved significantly over the past 30 years in China and the cost of printing in China has risen to equal the cost of printing in Eastern Europe. Concurrently, living standards in China have also dramatically increased. Within 30 years, the country has been lifted out of poverty and this year, the Chinese middle class population has breached 700 million – over two times the US population. Owning private property, financial assets, vacationing abroad, and sending children overseas to school, the ascent of the middle class–along with it the global expansion of Chinese capital–has occured at a time of declining Western influence around the world.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion amongst printers about the future of book printing. Advancements in high speed digital inkjet machines have made it possible to print one book at a time, from intelligent prepress, to high-speed finishing, streamlining the supply chain into a singular, machine-based process. Individualized books are printed and bound in seconds. Everything is inline: the intersection of online point of sale, artificial intelligence, Espresso Book Machines, and direct-to-consumer delivery. These printers can print special inks and every impression — even every book trimming — can be unique.

Artron recently purchased two of these new high speed digital inkjet printers. Watching demo videos on YouTube of some of these machines with names like JetStream 1000, Domino K630i or Jet520NX, and enhanced with electronic background music, can be alluring. New dawn. Infeed nip drive. NEW EXPANDABLE. Recto dryer. NEW EXTREME. Web buffer. FLEXIBLE. Three knife trimmer. INJET HEADS. TotalFlow. Imagine. Change.

At Artron, presschecking and adjustments happen very quickly. Because printers are financially incentivized to print faster, most of my time is often spent waiting for the printer to calibrate the machines for the next printing form. The more adjustments one makes on press, the less forms can be printed in a day, and the slower the total workflow of the project. Every aspect of Artron is designed to maximize speed and productivity. The more efficient the supply chain, the more profit the company makes.

I spend most of my time waiting inside the cafe at Artron, often at a table in a separate room decorated wall to wall with books that they have previously printed. There are a lot of luxury publications from companies such as Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Gucci. These titles are usually extravagant, with velour covers, type flocked in gold glitter, or other excessive printing techniques. The luxury books sit amongst titles from famous contemporary artists and galleries around the world. These catalogs are often gargantuan, larger than any book formats I’ve ever seen. Wei once showed me a book printed at Artron in A0 format. These books are often printed off grain, or glued cheaply with Chinese PUR hot glue so that they do not open well. There seems to be a pattern where the larger the budget of a job, the more extravagant the form, and the lower the quality of final production.

Back at the hotel, I’ll often return late at night. There are usually female escorts waiting in the shadows by the elevator, hoping to be taken up to a room, and I try to hurry by, attempting not to make eye contact. Up in the room, I turn on the TV, take a shower and order a club sandwich.

Eric Wei: Did you arrive at the hotel?
Geoff Han: Yes
Eric Wei: Ok, goodnight and have a nice sleep
Eric Wei: See you tomorrow
Geoff Han: Thanks see you tomorrow
Eric Wei: You are welcome

Because printing forms are checked under controlled white light, I like to unravel the checked forms from the day on the hotel beds and view them in normal lighting conditions. Both beds will be covered by different printing forms, creating a new upholstery of offset-printed sheets. Afterwards, I’ll roll up the printing sheets and quickly fall asleep until I wake up to return to the factory again the next morning.