Melissa Chiu

Inventive text collages made from Calvin and Hobbes comicsLos Angeles-based Tony Lewis (born 1986) is part of an exciting generation of artists working to collapse the boundaries between genres and forms. He has quickly established himself in the art world by forming a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates poetry and text with the properties of abstraction. His monochromatic drawings pull from various visual and written sources, ranging from the personal to the political. Separating, rearranging and erasing text, he shifts the way we read to open up new and unexpected meanings.To create Anthology 2014-2016, Lewis deconstructed hundreds of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, reordered them and shaped them into poems through a process of erasing, editing and rearranging dialogue. Each poem is assembled as a collage of individual drawings that explores the collaborative nature of creativity and authorship, leaving meaning open to a range of interpretations.

The first major book on OSGEMEOS (Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo) follows the twins from their origins in 1970s Sao Paulo to the height of world graffiti fame. Combining folkloric and contemporary elements of Brazilian society with graffiti, hip-hop, and youth culture, the artists expansive body of work embraces murals, paintings, sculpture, installations, and video, all using a symbolic visual language often inspired by dreams. Renowned for their spindly yellow characters often seen dancing, writing graffiti, interacting with their urban settings, and stretching high across buildings and train cars worldwide OSGEMEOS creates works that invite readers into a surreal, chimerical world filled with motifs that signal access to another realm or the deep psyche. Their fantasy world, called Tritrez, is the apex of their vision: a land of wonder that reflects the diverse nature of Brazil itself. Contributions from scholars and graffiti-world greats accompany photos of their work from the past four decades in OSGEMEOS: Endless Story, as well as, for the first time, a selection of their black-book drawings.

The first and only comprehensive volume exploring the artist’s best-known and most spectacular series This book presents world-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s most famous series, the Infinity Mirror Rooms, and charts its influence on the course of contemporary art for over 50 years. Kusama’s rooms are filled with multicolored lights that reflect endlessly. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. This definitive publication traces these installations and reveals how, over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities, from Kusama’s “self-obliteration” in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent atmospheres, this publication historicizes her pioneering work amid today’s renewed interest in experiential practices. Generously illustrated, this book invites readers to examine the series’ impact over the course of the artist’s career. Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) has worked not only in sculpture and installation but also painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction and other arts. In her early career in Japan, she produced mostly works on paper. With her late-1950s move to New York City, she joined the ranks of the avant-garde, working in soft sculpture and influencing the likes of Warhol and Oldenburg. At this time, she was also involved with happenings and other performance-oriented works and began to deploy her signature dots. Her work fell into relative obscurity after her return to Japan in 1973, but a subsequent revival of interest in the 1980s elevated her work to the canonical status that it still enjoys today.

This groundbreaking book, accompanying a major exhibition at the Hirshhorn, tells the story of the evolution of New York s downtown art scene in the 1980s from a DIY counterculture in the East Village to a legitimate gallery business in SoHo. Coinciding with the rise of modern branding and the onset of the information age, artists focus on commodities and consumerism began as satire but came to be much more complex: commodities and associated phenomena, such as advertising, now served as vessels for ideas, politics, and personal relationships in brand-new types of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance. In a book full of visual surprises, newly commissioned essays shed new light on this pivotal period: curator Gianni Jetzer provides a comprehensive overview, while Leah Pires illuminates lesser-known conceptual collaborations, and Bob Nickas offers an eyewitness account of the East Village gallery scene. These texts, together with an illustrated chronology, provide a fresh account of the moment at which contemporary artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman grabbed the ball from Andy Warhol and ran with it, changing the rules of the game forever.

The remarkable phenomenon of the twenty-first-century art world is contemporary Asian art. Fueled by a newfound openness in the East, and by an economic boom that has promoted a vibrant cultural confidence, art made in Asia or by Asian artists since the 1990s has become dynamic and exciting, acknowledged and appreciated by collectors, critics, and curators. This authoritative, wide-ranging volume surveys the contemporary art of Asia, examining key issues and themes: art’s relationship to history and tradition, its engagement with politics, society, and the state, its exploration of consumerism and popular culture, and its interplay with the urban environment. Artists range from the established—Nam June Paik, On Kawara, Yoko Ono, Cai Guo-Qiang, Takashi Murakami—to the emerging—Indonesian cartoon artist Wedhar Riyadi, Mongolian site-specific artist Chaolun Baatar, Pakistani graffiti artist Naiza Khan, Vietnamese-American photo artist Dinh Q. Le, and many more. Together, these artists represent the range of Asian countries, from Indonesia to Japan, Uzbekistan to South Korea, Iran to China. More than 230 sumptuous illustrations capture the full scope of the artists’ practice, from calligraphy, painting, sculpture, and photography to performance, installation, video, and Internet art. Complete with comprehensive biographies, Asian Art Now is both a superb critical overview and the consummate visual reference.

A groundbreaking look at art made in China during the Cultural Revolution Although numerous books on the Cultural Revolution have been published, they do not analyze the profound shift in aesthetic values that occurred in China after the Communists took power. This fascinating book is the first to focus on artwork produced from the 1950s to the 1970s, when Mao Zedong was in leadership, and argues that important contributions were made during this period that require fuller consideration in Chinese art history, especially with relevance to the contemporary world. Previously, historians have tended to dismiss the art of the Cultural Revolution as pure propaganda. The authors of this volume (historians, art historians, and artists) argue that while much art produced during this time was infused with politics, and individual creativity and displays of free thought were sometimes stifled and even punished, it is short sighted to overlook the aesthetic sophistication, diversity, and accessibility of much of the imagery. Bringing together more than 200 extraordinary artworks, including oil paintings, ink scroll paintings, artist sketchbooks, posters, and objects from daily life, as well as primary documentation that has not been published outside of China or seen since the mid-20th century, this invaluable volume sheds new light on one of the most controversial and critical periods in history.Published in association with the Asia Society MuseumExhibition Schedule:Asia Society Museum (September 5, 2008 – January 4, 2009)