John Yau

Known for his internationally popular memoir, I Remember, which uniquely captures 1950s America, Joe Brainard (1942 1994) was also a prolific and beloved artist. This beautifully illustrated book covers the entire range of his versatile art, including hundreds of drawings, collages, assemblages, prints, and paintings, many unpublished or never exhibited. Brainard was closely associated with the New York School, a community of poets and artists such as Frank O Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, who thrived in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and 70s. Brainard transformed ordinary objects and ephemera collected from his Lower East Side neighborhood into stunning assemblages and collages. The book brings together Brainard s classic subjects, such as the comic strip heroine Nancy; Madonnas (inspired by Ukrainian images in the Lower East Side); his iconic pansies, poppies, and daisies; and erotic works (male torsos). Poet and art critic John Yau describes in vivid detail how Brainard produced thousands of lush multimedia pieces radiant with poignancy, wit, intimacy, and a sheer beauty that express Brainard s unabashed affection for the world.

The first full-career survey of an American artist redefining contemporary landscape painting through a powerful blend of abstraction, realism, memory, and environmental experience. This landmark volume offers the most comprehensive look yet at Eric Aho (b. 1966), widely recognized as one of today's leading painters of landscape and the natural world. Tracing four decades of artistic evolution, the book follows Aho from his luminous, enigmatic Ice Cuts--geometric openings carved into frozen ponds--to his visceral Fire Paintings, which explore destruction, renewal, and the shifting forces of the environment. His recent Wild Meadow and Firefly series capture seasonal transitions with striking immediacy and emotional depth. Rooted in the American landscape tradition, Aho's work evokes the spiritual power of Marsden Hartley, the lyrical clarity of Fairfield Porter, the meditative abstraction of Agnes Martin, and the sweeping drama of Thomas Cole--yet remains unmistakably contemporary and wholly his own. This volume features two gatefolds and stunning reproductions that illuminate Aho's singular approach to painting nature--its atmospheres, transformations, and unseen energies. A vivid and immersive celebration of an artist who brings new vision and vitality to landscape painting today.

A collection of poetry showcasing the diversity of subjects and forms in Yau’s writing. This collection brings together work from half a century of writing by John Yau. Preoccupied with forms and musical structures, Yau’s work includes sestinas, sonnets, pantoums, and lists, as well as invented forms. Employing both strict and open-ended frameworks, Yau creates multi-faceted poems that can shift abruptly from humor to outrage and consider topics including Chinese American identity, school shootings, invented countries, and haunted memories. Some poems are grounded in an autobiographical voice, while others take on the voices of other characters, including contemporary artists and a fictional Chinese private eye. Spanning the vast diversity of Yau’s forms and subjects, the poems in Diary of Small Discontents add up to an unapologetically original collection.

The first comprehensive monograph on the master contemporary Korean American sculptor, from his seminal wire sculptures to his never-before-seen early works formed of steel. John Pai (b. 1937) is a prolific multimedia artist whose handmade three-dimensional sculptures are, paradoxically, still objects that seem to exist in a state of movement and transformation. This full-career survey of Pai s inventive work consists of his rarely seen early work up to the present. Pai s incredibly intricate, three-dimensional abstract 'drawings in space' are made of endless lengths of individual steel or copper rods and textured sheets made from hundreds of rods welded together. Unlike many contemporary sculptors who draw a sketch and let metalworkers do the actual construction, Pai continues to do all his work himself?from choosing the materials to the labor-intensive process of welding and bending the metals into complex and sometimes massive forms. Immigrating from Korea to the US at age 11, Pai showed his prodigious talent for art at a young age. He received a scholarship to attend Pratt Institute, and in the 1960s, Pai became the youngest professor appointed to the faculty at Pratt. Leading its fine arts and sculpture programs for nearly four decades, Pai proved a talented and beloved educator, nurturing generations of sculptors and fostering the burgeoning Korean artistic community in New York with those such as his contemporary Nam June Paik, reflecting a sensibility outside the mainstream of American art.

Poems that consider doubleness and truth-telling through the voice of an Asian American poet, while referencing a range of writers and pop culture figures. Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems with the oft-quoted line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant." For Asian Americans, the word “slant” can be heard and read two ways, as both a racializing and an obscuring term. It is this sense of doubleness—culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator—that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems in John Yau’s new collection, all of which focus on the questions of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to. Made up of eight sections, each exploring the idea of address—as place, as person, as memory, and as event —Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Yau summons spirits who help the author “tell all the truth,” among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester.

AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNERFar-ranging and thought-provoking essays on the relation of art and ethnic identity.This first collection by award-winning author John Yau, drawn from decades of work, includes essays about Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists: sculptors Luis Jimenez and Ruth Asawa; "second generation Abstract Expressionists" such as the Black painter Ed Clark and the Japanese American painter Matsumi Kanemitsu; the performance artists James Luna and Patty Chang; the photographers Laurel Nakadate and Teju Cole; and a generation of Asian American artists that has emerged during the last decade. While identity is at the fore in this collection, Yau's essays also propose the need for an expansive view of identity, as in the essay "On Reconsidering Identity," which explores the writings of Lydia Cabrera and Edouard Glissant, and the possibilities of creolisation versus the reductiveness of Aime Cesaire's Negritude.Please Wait by the Coat Room is for serious readers interested in the art and artists of color that many mainstream institutions and critics misrepresented or overlooked. It presents a view guided by the artists' desire for autonomy and freedom in a culture that has deemed them undesirable or invisible.

A diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events. At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau’s poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo’s imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau’s poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.

This is the first major look at the work of the renowned yet intensely private and reclusive artist William Tillyer (b. 1938), best known for his abstract oil paintings, watercolours, and prints. Tillyer s skill and hugely varied body of work make him one of Britain s most respected artists, in the same generation as Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Tillyer is finally getting the recognition he deserves. While Tillyer s paintings are largely abstract, they are based on the landscape of North Yorkshire, where he has lived and worked for most of his life. The book covers Tillyer s experiments with nontraditional materials and techniques his 3D panels, cut canvases, constructed works with found objects, printmaking with a wide range of processes, and paintings on wire mesh.

The remarkable plein air paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b.1963), which chronicle everyday lives within our diverse modern world, are the focus of this first monograph of his career to date. Immersing himself in communities around the globe, Xiaodong seeks to present people who often sit on the fringes of society who find themselves marginalised within a contemporary world striving for homogenisation. At first glance a traditional realist painter, closer examination reveals an artist exploring a range of media while interrogating the opportunities presented by modern technology. The result is an outstanding body of work, often monumental in scale, that examines, reconsiders, and extends observational painting in fresh directions, while bringing into question the lines between fact and fiction, the traditional and the contemporary, to create a wholly original vision.

H is here, in the truest sense, the alpha and omega. Helmut Federle uses the first letter of his first name as a format-filling, artistic matrix on canvases measuring between forty and fifty centimetres. Since his early days as an artist in the late 1970s, he has created seventy variations of Liegendes H (Reclining H). The basic form of three lines and two squares enumerates the variations of expressions in painting. Their synopsis plays with figure and ground, forming an inventive collection of painterly techniques and the atmospheres they evoke. At the same time, the subtitles for the individual works seem to hint at the specific horizons of experience in their creation. They lend each work a poetic dimension, as one tries to imagine the artist’s world in the planes of colour. Thus, each picture represents Helmut and is, in its mysterious originality, a fascinating haiku.

This book presents a comprehensive view of the work of American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), who has expanded the parameters of painting through his use of silkscreen, linocuts, collage, stencils, gouache, chine-collé, marbling, acrylic, enamel, watercolour and gold leaf. Possessing many technical skills, Taaffe has moved decisively between unique pictorial inventions and appropriations, as well as overlaying divergent modes of representation, through cultural patterns found in ornament, and biomorphic abstraction.John Yau's insightful text is the first to look at every part of Taaffe's artistic development, from the works he made at Cooper Union while a student of Hans Haacke, to the present. It pays special attention to Taaffe's acquisition of different techniques, as well as investigating his various sources of inspiration, which include the work of experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Harry Smith, the Natural History illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, and the ancient art of paper marbling.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. At the conclusion of BIJOUX IN THE DARK, John Yau states, I did not write a hauntingly beautiful book. A line that contrasts with the book's introductory poem, in which hauntings and beauty abound. With all of BIJOUX IN THE DARK, the answer is multifaceted as Yau disavows pretension and expectation and instead heeds a candor beyond categorization. Sonnets and pantoums abound alongside graffiti and Top Ten lists. Yau's work veers from satire, ekphrasis, and homage to imagined histories, surreal dimensions, and Egyptology. The book's list of characters includes Albrecht Durer, Hieronymus Bosch, Francis Bacon, Mark Wahlberg, Donald Trump, Dante, and Meng Chiao. Yet, from this miscellany there comes an ingenious whole deft in its wit and bite. Here John Yau is at home with the quirky and the profound, and any combination thereof.

This volume highlights the work of American artist Leon Polk Smith (1906-96), one of the founders of the hard-edge style of minimalist art, who rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s with his distinctive shaped canvas series. While his minimalist peers were shifting away from modernism, Smith was wholeheartedly advancing the formal and rational elements of the modernist tradition, in particular the legacy of Mondrian. Published for a 2017 exhibition at Lisson Gallery, this book focuses on paintings and drawings from the artist's seminal Constellation series from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The publication features an essay by the poet and writer John Yau, alongside color reproductions of each of the works included in the exhibition. An illustrated chronology details the artist's life and work, including previously unpublished archival material.

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent charts a territory built of speculative histories, indeterminate landscapes, and mock narratives, all of them at the threshold linking exterior and interior worlds. Their logic is highly grammatical and slyly confounding, perfectly clear and drawn from dream. It is here, "between / what is occluded and what has elapsed," that Mahrer's ambiguous, disordered subjects begin their journeys.

Realist sculptor Carole A. Feuerman's human-figure sculptures express a refreshing perspective on the mundane but intensely personal activities of modern life. Her powers of observation and versatility find unique expression through various materials that include marble, bronze, vinyl, and painted resins, while she incorporates both ancient and contemporary methods in the creation of her works. Swimmers: By Carole A. Feuerman is a shimmering glimpse at transitory, contemplative moments in time, often captured in a veil of clear resin that replicates tumbling water droplets. In this new collection of Feuerman's work, her printwork and treatment of the figure on paper is also explored for the first time. In his astute and insightful essay, John Yau describes Feuerman's exquisitely rendered subjects as being "caught in a moment of transition that radiates an intense eroticism." Her figures seem capable of thought, evoking an inward life that invites our speculation while revealing a mysterious provocative chasm between the figures and the viewer. Feuerman's sculpture and prints provide us with a fleeting glimpse into private and isolated environments - women stepping out of the shower, in the rain, or swimming - that suggest a meditative bliss. Feuerman museum retrospectives have included exhibitions at The State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia; The Palazzo Strozzi Foundation in Florence, Italy; and the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, among others. Her work is featured in public, private, and corporate collections, including Grounds for Sculpture, Trenton, NJ; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; and art-st-urban, Lucerne, Switzerland. Her large-scale Olympic Swimmer was featured in the Olympic Fine Arts exhibition at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

Yau tweaks and twists language to express a painful comic vision in which sensual vividness combines with fierce despair.--BooklistJohn Yau engages art criticism, social theory, and syntactical dexterity to confront the problems of aging, meaning, and identity. Insisting that True poets and artists know where language ends, which is why they go there, Yau presses against the limits of language, creating poems that are at once cryptic, playful, and insightful. Included in its entirety is his groundbreaking serial poem, Genghis Chan: Private Eye, and a new series invoking the monochromatic painter Yves Klein.From Exhibits: Can you name which country uses selective amnesia to determine its foreign policy?.Money has become a vast dirty sea rolling over the land..Money has become a UFO because it is the only thing that lacks controversy..Money rhymes with algae..Do you swear to tell the whole truth filled with nothing but reasonable lies?.Signing up for Free Membership works best in a failing economy..In case of emergency, please vacuum the premises..I used to be thorough, now I am just comprehensive . . . John Yau is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He is the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail and teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University. He lives in the Garment District neighborhood in New York City.

The quarterly review ""MELUS"" said of John Yau, ""[his] poetic and critical writings...present an intriguing site of investigation into questions of racial authenticity,"" while ""Publishers Weekly"" has described Yau's poetry as ""[l]anding somewhere between the surreal-noir aesthetics of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive; a kinder, gentler version of J.K. Huysman's Paris decadence; and the aggregated syllables of Jackson Mac Low's overheard New York..."" In ""The Passionate Spectator"", Yau turns his attention to some of our most renowned poets and artists, such as John Ashbery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Creeley, and Frank O'Hara. The eleven essays herein include: ""Passionate Spectator: On Frank O'Hara's Art Criticism""; ""At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara""; ""The Poet as Art Critic (On John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara)""; ""Feelings Are Not Quiet (On Robert Creeley)""; ""Robert Creeley and George Baselitz's Signs""; ""Philip Lamantia""; ""Archie Rand's 'The Letter Paintings' ""; ""Street Song: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Poetry of Kevin Young""; ""The Poetry of Jessica Stockholder's Titles""; ""The Poet Painters: Francesco Clemente and Nicola De Maria""; and ""Open Books: (On ""Emblems for Robert Duncan"" by Jess).

The Passionate Spectator collects essays, reviews, and art criticism by John Yau, an internationally lauded poet, critic, and curator. In this wide-ranging collection, Yau explores the intersection of art and poetry, dissolving boundaries between the artistic traditions and reimagining what it means to see and to write. Whether he is interpreting the poetic use of titles in Jessica Stockholder’s paintings, reviewing the collaborative book project between American poet Robert Creeley and German artist Georg Baselitz, or considering the significance of Frank O’Hara’s decision to have his portrait drawn wearing nothing but army boots, Yau is consistently daring, original, and contemporary. Yau’s diverse critical sensibilities permeate The Passionate Spectator as he moves seamlessly between the visual and literary arts. Highlights of this collection include an essay on the poet as art critic, a study of the relationship between Kevin Young’s poetry and the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and an imaginative piece in which Yau speculates about what Jorge Luis Borges would have created had he been a visual artist. In the title essay, Yau lays out the duty of the spectator—a duty shared by viewer, reader, critic, and artist: “it is up to us to experience art, to engage and believe in its power.” .