Kirjahaku

This first monograph on Phillip Lai (b.1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) charts the artist’s sculptural development over the course of the last two decades. From a basement soy-sauce factory to the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, the publication surveys several of the artist’s exhibitions across London, Wakefield, Turin, Berlin and Hong Kong. The nine chapters explore an evolving oeuvre that finds form in materials like aluminium, pewter, concrete, resin, rice, cooking pots, textiles and film. It is through these technologies that Lai broaches the material limits of the everyday world, often working with casting processes that see the abstraction and changing stability of materials as they transition from fluid to solid. What comes into focus is a fascination with how objects can relieve or modulate primal human urges to food and water and how, by extension, a material world might be re-envisioned around concerns of depletion and survival. This publication includes an essay by critic and writer Jan Verwoert, with bilingual text in English and Chinese throughout.

What do we learn by making art? What do we discover by discussing our art with other people? These are the questions at the heart of No New Kind of Duck, which documents an exchange between Jan Verwoert and artists, critics, and other researchers at the Graduate School at the Berlin University of the Arts, including artists Alex Martinis Roe, Jeremiah Day, Azin Feizabadi, Lizza May David, and Ralf Baecker and composers Nuria Nunez Hierro and Bjorn Erlach. Creating art and coining the terms to explain and define one's artistic practice, the contributors find, are two closely related yet distinct practices. The book begins with an introduction by Verwoert that discusses the politics of art as a form of knowledge production. Verwoert's introduction is followed by contributions that turn the focus on the stakes of an art practice today. The book also presents a careful selection of art, in which each piece is presented without accompanying explanations or justification, highlighting the possibilities for artists to coin their own terms to describe the concerns of their practice. Beautifully designed by artist Nienke Terpsma, the book will be an equally welcome companion for established or aspiring artists.