Former Capital Steel Factory, Beijing.

Photo credit: Tong Lam
(2011)

The photograph featured on the cover of a 2015 issue of EASTS (Vol. 9, No. 3) does something quite different. A discarded bed, a rusting train on a half-buried track—the objects that we see in this scene gesture unmistakably toward something beyond themselves, whispering to us of a life that once was but is no more, forgotten ghosts. Instead of circumscribing the imagination to specify the appearance of a particular object or individual, this cover image urges us to dream—to speculate about the story behind scene, and to wonder how this story relates to the studies inside the issue.

This is what covers do: they pose riddles and prompt the search for meanings. On the cover of this 2017 issue of EASTS (Vol. 11, No. 3) we see shadowy, megacephalic spirits, floating plants, and Bosch-like walking eggs. It is a mysterious image, and the caption inside only adds to the its enigmatic allusiveness: the picture, we are told, incorporates negatives of the artist’s own body and an MRI scan of her brain, and belongs to a series called Clinical Path of the Sphinx. What do these elements have to do with articles on stem cells and bottled water, cultural psychology and scientific thought? We open the journal expectantly, curious, engaged.