Gutai is the first book in English to examine Japan’s best-known modern art movement, a circle of postwar artists whose avant-garde paintings, performances, and installations foreshadowed many key developments in American and European experimental art.
Working with previously unpublished photographs and archival resources, Ming Tiampo considers Gutai’s pioneering transnational practice, spurred on by mid-century developments in mass media and travel that made the movement’s field of reception and influence global in scope. Using these lines of transmission to claim a place for Gutai among modernist art practices while tracing the impact of Japan on art in Europe and America, Tiampo demonstrates the fundamental transnationality of modernism. Ultimately, Tiampo offers a new conceptual model for writing a global history of art, making Gutai an important and original contribution to modern art history.

Gutai: Decentering Modernism

Arts & Photography

Tiampo, Ming

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Gutai is the first book in English to examine Japan’s best-known modern art movement, a circle of postwar artists whose avant-garde paintings, performances, and installations foreshadowed many key developments in American and European experimental art.
Working with previously unpublished photographs and archival resources, Ming Tiampo considers Gutai’s pioneering transnational practice, spurred on by mid-century developments in mass media and travel that made the movement’s field of reception and influence global in scope. Using these lines of transmission to claim a place for Gutai among modernist art practices while tracing the impact of Japan on art in Europe and America, Tiampo demonstrates the fundamental transnationality of modernism. Ultimately, Tiampo offers a new conceptual model for writing a global history of art, making Gutai an important and original contribution to modern art history.

Some fifty years ago, the remote Arctic community of Cape Dorset was introduced to the ancient traditions of Japanese printmaking by a Canadian artist, James Houston, who had studied printmaking in Japan with the revered master printmaker Un'ichi Hiratsuka. The remarkable story of that artistic encounter and its extraordinary results are the focus of this groundbreaking book. With two major essays and detailed captions, it features 49 exquisite and rare artworks (including Inuit prints from 1947 to 1963 and Japanese prints that were brought to Cape Dorset in 1959, as well as never-before-seen works by James Houston), and shows how Cape Dorset graphic artists selectively borrowed and actively transformed Japanese influences. It includes the voice of Cape Dorset printmaker Kananginak Pootoogook, as well as previously unplished historic photographs from Japan and Cape Dorset.

Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration

Ikeda, Asato

Vorano, Norman

Canadian Museum of History

The Gutai Art Association was founded by Yoshihara Jiro in 1954 in the cosmopolite town of Ashiya, near Osaka. The group spanned two generations, totaling 59 artists and is one of the most radical movements in postwar Japanese art history. Published in conjunction with the first United States museum retrospective ever devoted to Gutai, exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Gutai: Splendid Playground surveys the influential Japanese collective and artistic movement. This exhibition catalogue aims to demonstrate the range of bold and innovative creativity present in the avant-garde movement, to examine the aesthetic strategies in the cultural, social and political context of postwar Japan and the West, and to further establish Gutai in an expanded, transnational history and critical discourse of modern art. Organized thematically and chronologically to explore Gutai’s unique approach to materials, concepts, process, performativity and enviroment, this publication investigates the group’s radical experimentation across a range of media and styles, and demonstrates how individual artists pushed the limits of what art could be or mean in a post-atomic era. The range includes painting, conceptual art, performance, film, installation art, sound art, interactive art, light art and kinetic art. Illustrating some 120 objects by 25 artists and featuring both iconic Gutai and lesser-known works, Splendid Playground presents a rich survey reflecting new scholarship, especially on “late Gutai” works dating from 1965 to 1972. The bold and innovative catalogue design reflects the unfettered creativity of Gutai. In addition, an extensive appendix features a selection of Gutai artists’ writings, an illustrated chronology, artist biographies and a bibliography.

Gutai: Splendid Playground

Munroe, Alexandra

Jiro, Yoshihara

Shoichi, Hirai

Guggenheim Museum

In Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work, Ming Tiampo reveals how Yoon's multidisciplinary art-which includes photography, video, performance, and installation-reconnects troubled pasts with damaged presents to create the conditions for a better future. This new title considers how one of Canada's most important voices developed a critical perspective on the dissemination of national narratives through tourism and art history with iconic works such as Souvenirs of the Self, 1991, and A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996, which, as Tiampo notes, have become "canonical touchstones in the public articulation of Canadian identity and race." 
Yoon's earliest works questioned the construction of self and other, unpacking stereotypical assumptions and dominant discourses on gender and sexuality, culture and ethnicity, and citizenship and nationhood. Adopting a wider and wider lens over time, her recent works investigate entangled global relations of colonialism, tourism, and militarism, unearthing difficult histories and connecting them to our present circumstances. Ultimately, her stirring art asks us to reimagine our relationships to each other and to the planet in order to build more hopeful futures.

Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work (The Canadian Art Library Series)

The Canadian Art Library

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Books by Tiampo, Ming

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tiampo, Ming. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gutai: Decentering Modernism

Gutai: Decentering Modernism

Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration

Gutai: Splendid Playground

Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work (The Canadian Art Library Series)