Latest titles

2025   Bird shaped vinyl, Kai Udema

Published

2024   Sets (#1–6), Johanna Himmelsbach
2024   Dragons, Mijia Wang
2024   Fuel your ambition, Johanna Himmelsbach, Célia Picard & Hannes Schreckensberger
2022   ircle crcle cicle cirle circe circl (mantra), Kai Udema

Upcoming events

14.07.25   The Books Are Bridges Art Book Fest, PrintRoom, Rotterdam (NL)

Previous events

16.05 — 18.05.25   Offprint, London (EN)
03.05 — 04.05.25   Ghent Art Book Fair, Ghent (BE)
11.10 — 26.10.24   Fuel Your Ambition (exhibition), Glassbox Sud, Montpellier (FR)
01.08 — 31.08.24   Around Publishing: Reading Room, Kitchen, Garden, Shanghai (CH)
11.05 — 12.05.24   Ghent Art Book Fair, Ghent (BE)
24.04 — 26.04.24   Fuel Your Ambition (launch), CONFORT MENTAL, Paris (FR)


Soft concern hard concern (Amsterdam) is an initiative dedicated to the publishing of visually predominant experiments. Founded in 2024 by Johanna Himmelsbach and Kai Udema, the publishing house is concerned with making artist books and complementary objects in small editions.

Lauriergracht 116A
1016RR Amsterdam
The Netherlands

For orders, questions and other contact:
hard-concern@soft-concern.com




         
  Coming soon
How they met themselves (n°11)
Andrea Salerno

 8p, 45×31.5cm, offset, 2025
Appropriating the appropriated, Andrea Salerno weaves together two copies of Le Point d’Ironie n°11 (Hans-Peter Feldmann, 1999) as part of his series How They Met Themselves. This large unbound booklet is printed on 90 grams silk paper, showing the work in a 1:1 scale. Distributed folded in half and sealed in a plastic wrapping.

ISBN 978-9-08352-111-4

                         
Bird shaped vinyl
Kai Udema

 208p, 28×19cm, offset, screenprinted dustjacket, 2025 €34
Bird shaped vinyl is a book by Kai Udema based on a collection of shapes traced from the negative spaces of broken windows. Compiling nine exercises, each exercise visualizes a different mathematical principle, suggesting an ambivalent understanding of logic vs intuition, decision vs chance, chaos vs order. Shifting between object, print, image and page, the book attempts to visualize the metaphysical qualities of the hole through its own. Open spine binding, glued and stitched, with a silkscreened plastic dustjacket.

ISBN 978-9-08-352110-7

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Sets
Johanna Himmelsbach

 6 sheets, 42x21cm, ComColor, 2024 €18
Sets is a series of unbound images by Johanna Himmelsbach collected between 2021 and 2024 inside a house, among birch, rowan and winding pine trees along the Swedish coast, at the Bibliothek Andreas Züst in Switserland, and places in between. Leaving the order of images in each set open to its reader, the work explores the process of editing through free association and proposes understanding images as words. Each Set is distributed individually and comes in a durable plastic sleeve containing six one-sided prints. Printed with a ComColor on 60gr paper at Masereel, Belgium.

Set 1: House, Birch and Rowan
Set 2: Red currant tear
Set 3: The library as a hypnotist
Set 4: Sun burning summer
Set 5: Dropper cables
Set 6: Blue remote together

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Dragons
Mijia Wang

 24p, 21.6×27.9cm, ComColor, 2024 €15
A series of children’s drawings tells the short story of a girl who, through an act of metamorphosis, saves a village from a tyrannous monster. As the story abstractly concludes her transformation into the idea of authorship, the book itself simultaneously raises questions about its own authorship. The text was borrowed by artist Mijia Wang from subtitles from the film Erzählen (1975). In response to the work Bird shaped vinyl by Kai Udema — a series of shapes from broken windows — she invited a class of toddlers to draw dragons onto copies of his collected shapes.

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Fuel your ambition
Johanna Himmelsbach, Célia Picard & Hannes Schreckensberger

 36p, 35.5×46cm, offset, unbound, 2024 €35
An exploration on muscle regeneration and recovery, Fuel your ambition is a visual essay by Johanna Himmelsbach in dialogue with the artistic research of Célia Picard and Hannes Schreckensberger. Offering a mental space for rest and meditation combined with interviews with athletes, the publication proposes intense physical exercise as a contemporary method of self-exploration and deepening. Co-published with Revue DAS.

ISBN 979-10-415-3139-4

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ircle crcle cicle cirle circe circl (mantra)
Kai Udema

 32p, 23×40cm, riso printed, 2022 €30
Riso-printed on a 1:1 scale, the publication features 16 images of analogue distorted variations of a black circle on an A4. Like a visual meditation, the booklet documents an open-ended exercise in printing, abstraction and metamorphosis. Each copy is bound in a different order and contains a different cover image.

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