In Western Europe, a generation of young people spends its weekends becoming someone else. Xiaoxiao Xu’s “This looks better irl – Exploring Cosplay Cons” follows them as they make costumes and gather at conventions, a subculture shaped largely by Asian comics, animation, games, and film. The title is a phrase from that world, where the screen is rarely enough; the book takes its stand on the side of the room, the body, and the handmade object.

Xu brings an unusual vantage point. Born in China and based in the Netherlands, she has photographed there for years, and this project turns her attention to how Asian popular culture circulates and is remade in the West. Shooting over several conventions, she portrays participants whose costumes run from frankly amateur to uncannily lifelike. Hers is not a survey of spectacle. The cosplay community is diverse, and its mutual acceptance draws a significant number of neurodivergent people; Xu’s portraits and encounters register the social and emotional difficulties many in it carry, and ask what the costumes may conceal as much as express.

A second strand gives the book its structure. Xu gathered hundreds of screenshots from cosplayers’ social media accounts, and these recur through the sequence, setting the performances against the online selves that precede and accompany them. The result is a portrait of a subculture lived across two registers at once, where the convention hall and the feed, the photographed body and the posted image, are continually referred to one another.

Rob van Hoesel’s design, in a softcover volume of 196 pages, holds this double material together. For collectors attentive to contemporary documentary, the book is notable for how deliberately it joins photographic portraiture to the ephemera of online self-presentation, and for Xu’s sustained study of a community that is usually looked at only from outside.