A fully illustrated retrospective look at the long and influential career of a challenging avant-garde artist reviews forty years of Ono's work, including films, music, and Conceptual art, and includes thought-provoking essays from respected scholars and a music CD.

Y E S Yoko Ono

Arts & Photography

David A. Ross

Jann S. Wenner

Alexandra Munroe

Yoko Ono

Jon Hendricks

Bruce Altshuler

Kevin C. Concannon

Reiko Tomii

Murray Sayle

Edward M. Gomez

History & Criticism

Harry N. Abrams

The exhibition contains 32 individual and group sculptures, all masterpieces of which many could be seen only in Japan. The statues range from peaceful, reflective and self-contained Buddhas ("ones who have awakened to the truth") to fanged and ferocious protective deities, assuming aggressive postures, their muscles and eyeballs bulging as they strive to cut through ignorance and defend Buddhist Law. A section of the exhibition is devoted to sculptural images depicting stages in the life to the historical Buddha, known in Japan as Shaka. The exhibition also displays examples from the major schools of Buddhism that flourished in Japan through the 14th century, including works from Esoteric Buddhism, and the Pure Land Sect. The exhibition also provides a broad perspective on the evolving tradition of the Buddhist sculptor, busshi, in Japan hand-in-hand with the evolution of construction techniques. Works attributed to the great schools of Buddhist sculpture as well as some primitive provincial masterpieces show the development of various techniques. Particular attention is devoted to wood sculptures made with the joined-block technique, which not only enabled sculptors to create larger, crack-resistant works more rapidly, but to produce sculptures with hollow interiors in which texts and sacred relics could be stored. Also included are sculptures made of other materials such as the statue of Gokei Monju, the Bodhisattva with five topknots, made of paper. This is the only paper Buddhist sculpture from the medieval period. This catalog is an essential reference work for students, scholars and those interested in Japanese Buddhist sculptor's techniques.

Enlightenment embodied: The art of the Japanese Buddhist sculptor (7th-14th centuries)

Roge Goepper

Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-Cho), Government of Japan, Japan Society

Xu Bing (born 1955) began his career at the crest of China's 1985 "New Wave" art. He relocated to the U.S. after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and has since emerged on the stage of global art as a hugely popular figure. Xu's sculptural explorations of his Chinese cultural heritage have produced large-scale installations deploying, for example, hand-carved printing blocks inscribed with 4,000 characters invented by the artist ("Book from the Sky" ); in "Where Does the Dust Collect Itself?" he arranged a handful of dust into a seventh-century Zen text. Xu's intercessions in the Chinese signifier's communication of meaning suggest the fragility of all cultural transmission within the continuum of history, and perhaps also point to the artist's own experience of displacement. With more than 400 reproductions of works from across Xu's career, this first complete retrospective is accompanied by critical commentary plus a full bibliography and exhibition chronology.

Xu Bing

Albion Editions

Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted (Naoto Nakagawa 1965-1975)

John Perreault

Eric C. Shiner

Naoto Nakagawa

White Box

Kazuo Shiraga Six Decades

Fergus McCaffrey

McCaffre Fine Art

Illustrated binding (issued without a dust jacket). 88 pages, profuse b/w and color ill. English text.

Hitoshi Nomura: Early Works - Sculpture, Photography, Film, Sound

Hitoshi Nomura

Martha Buskirk

McCaffrey Fine Art

Noriyuki Haraguchi

David Raskin

Ryan Holmberg

Ironically, Kazuo Shiraga's feet were nearly his feet of clay. The breakout star of the Gutai Art Association, Shiraga became colloquially known as the "foot painter"; the Japanese postwar movement's founder, Jiro Yoshihara, even dismissed Shiraga as a "nobody, if he didn't paint with his feet." After his 1955 performance "Challenging Mud," in which the artist wrestled a mixture of cement, gravel, clay, plaster, pebbles and twigs into a "formless form," Shiraga devised an entirely new painting technique. From 1959 onward, he suspended himself from his studio ceiling and manipulated the paint exclusively with his ten toes to create a range of textures from the slinky and supple to the protruding and violent. Almost 60 years later, Shiraga, whose dynamic contributions blend painting and performance, is still a misunderstood radical who is only now receiving the sort of American institutional and gallery attention that properly contextualizes the depth and reach of his practice.

Kazuo Shiraga

Ming Tiampo

Mnuchin

Kikuo Saito

Joshua Cohen

Hal Foster

Laura Brown

Other Means

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Books by Reiko Tomii