Along with fellow performance artist Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming is widely considered one of China's most innovative artists. He took up performance art after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, but was not able to show his work publicly until many years later. By the late 1990s, he had attracted international attention and begun showing abroad. Born in 1969, Liuming grew up in a China increasingly open to the rest of the world; in 1993, he had a formative studio visit with British artists Gilbert &amp; George, who were in Beijing for an exhibition. Androgynous and confrontational, Liuming is now best known for his radical performances as the lipsticked female alter ego, Fen. For example, in "Fen Ma Liuming in Lyon (France)," first performed in 2001, he drugs himself with sleeping pills and sits virtually motionless, while the audience is invited onstage. Audience activity varies from location to location, but usually at least a few take their own clothing off and join him. With an essay by writer and curator Eleonora Battiston, who specializes in Chinese contemporary art, this volume is a rare contextualization of Luiming's daring oeuvre.

Ma Liuming: "Performances, Paintings, Sculptures"

Arts & Photography

Hasegawa, Yuko

Lenczner, Serge

Liuming, Ma

History & Criticism

Damiani

In 1980, Italian-born duo Giampaiolo Bertozzi and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni teamed up to form the Bertozzi & Casoni company, making ceramics with a twist. After attending the esteemed Istituto d’Arte per la Ceramica in Faenza, they broke the mold, enlivening the staid medium with a conceptual edge, wry humor and a dose of art history. Their greatest hits include realistic, full-sized versions of classics like Warhol’s “Brillo Box” and Manzoni’s “Artist’s Shit.” Not content with just remaking this “cultural trash,” they also replicate beautiful, Daniel Spoerri-esque tableaux featuring cafeteria-tray remains and garbage bins. This volume is a rare chance to see Bertozzi & Casoni’s oeuvre in its entirety: It was produced for a survey of new and old work at Venice’s Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, which ran concurrently with the 2007 Bienniale. The artists most recently showed their work in New York at Sperone Westwater gallery.

Bertozzi & Casoni: Le Bugie Dell'Arte

Scarpa, Tiziano

Bertoni, Franco

Sorrentino, Daniele

Individual Artists

Jessica Todd Harper's first monograph is a highly charged collection of otherworldly domestic interiors that bring to mind both the religious intensity of Northern Renaissance artists like Albrecht Durer or Jan Van Eyck and the quiet eroticism and tenderness of Andrew Wyeth's Helga pictures. Portraying an intimate world flooded with warm and ethereal light, Harper explores the interior lives of her subjects with precision and honesty. A woman stands as an awkward column in front of her seated future in laws; a man looks on with a mixture of fear, awe and adoration at the naked body of his pregnant wife; a baby stares intently into the camera, a dapple of sunlight playing across his face: these spontaneous and emotionally intense scenes reveal themselves to also be carefully composed and orchestrated. One of the winners of the Santa Fe Center for Photography's Project competition, and included in PDN's prestigious list of "Emerging Photographers to Watch", Harper gives the viewer a fascinating glimpse into a provocative and beautiful intimate landscape.

Jessica Todd Harper: Interior Exposure

A black-and-white photograph captures a woman, curlers in her hair and a baby in her arms, standing in a messy kitchen and saying, “How can I worry about the damned dishes when there are children dying in Vietnam?” California photographer Bill Owens is best known for his critically acclaimed series Suburbia, which was published as a monograph in 1972, and has long been considered one of the classic photo books of the era. For this influential and evocative project, Owens simply shot friends and acquaintances in his Livermore, California, neighborhood and allowed them to speak for themselves. Ordinary people had rarely been so riveting. A comprehensive monograph, this volume consists of several sections of work from 1969 to the present, opening at the height of flower power, with images of the Beat generation, Woodstock and the protests against Vietnam. Owens has always remained intrigued by America as a subject: there follows a series of images focusing on urban America, its endless grids and homogeneous cities. In his most recent photos, many of which are in color and previously unpublished, Owens reveals how suburbia has evolved in the last 40 years--from the friendly place he captured in the 1970s to one characterized by sprawl and anonymity.

Bill Owens

Homes, A.M.

OWENS, Bill

Radical British political activist John “Hoppy” Hopkins--who opened the legendary UFO, London’s first psychedelic club, and published The International Times, London’s first daily underground paper--arrived in London in 1960 and started working immediately as a photojournalist. Well-known for his uniquely dynamic images of the Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithful, Hopkins studied physics at Cambridge and was set on becoming a nuclear physicist early on. Though he focused on rock music, Hopkins also explored its roots, capturing blues and jazz greats like John Lee Hooker, Sonny Williamson, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. For five years, he published his work in such papers as The Sunday Times, The Observer, Melody Maker, Jazz Journal and Peace News. With more than 150 images, this volume presents the most comprehensive survey of Hopkins’ work ever assembled, spanning the breadth of his career from his earliest shots of musicians to his later immersion in the psychedelic scene. Hopkins stopped working as a photojournalist in 1965, and began documenting his universe: drugs and drug users, Hells Angels, mods, Beats, tattoo artists and others who left a mark on the 60s counterculture, Vietnam protests, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. This remarkable publication documents the full spectrum of the political and cultural changes of his time.

John 'Hoppy' Hopkins: From the Hip

During the 1990s the Italian-born, London-based photographer Yvonne De Rosa volunteered in an old psychiatric hospital. Six years after it closed down, she returned to its decaying rooms and corridors to document the void left by the inpatients. The result is this touching study.

Yvonne De Rosa: Crazy God

Noble, Laura

Milano, Sarah

"Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body," states Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu, the subject of this highly anticipated first monograph. In recent years Mutu's work has become increasingly sought-after in the international art world, making high-profile appearances at the important art fairs and auctions. What makes her interesting, however, is her fierce and contemporary use of the well-worn medium of collage. Mutu deals with female and cultural identity in large-scale figurative pieces constructed from found and drawn imagery. Her figures are freakish and erotic hybrids of the primitive, contemporary and post-human. These sometimes garish, diseased, ravaged and distorted figures are made from seductive or silly materials like glossy fashion magazine pictures, glitter or fun fur. They refer to colonial history, contemporary African politics, the history of art and fashion--in often quite irreverent ways. Mutu's own diverse history--she has studied both anthropology and sculpture and has lived in Nairobi, Wales, New York and New Haven, where she received her MFA from Yale University in 2001--seems a likely source for her manifold concerns. This volume surveys Mutu's work to date.

Wangechi Mutu: A Shady Promise

Brielmaier, Isolde

Gaines, Malik

Veal, Michael

The recent Bollywood craze in the West might get more exposure, but contemporary Indian artists aren't far behind. New Delhi, New Wave is the best introduction to date to the work of established and emerging Indian artists--many of whom are dealing with the theme of women in fresh ways. Pushpamala N., for example, makes Cindy Sherman-esque portraits of herself as Indian female icons, from religious leaders to Bollywood actresses, while Anita Dube combines installation, photography, collage and video to explore Hindu iconography and tradition through a Feminist lens. Subodh Gupta, one of the best-known Indian artists on the international scene, uses quotidian objects to explore identity. At last summer's Venice Biennale, Gupta caused a sensation with "A Very Hungry God" (2006), a 2,000-pound skull crafted from shiny silver pots and pans, which he installed on a floating base in the Grand Canal. Shila Gupta, born in 1976, one of the youngest artists surveyed here, represents Delhi's newest wave. She has created a series of interactive works on the Web (www.blessed-bandwidth.net), where visitors are invited to choose a religion so that they may receive a blessing. Other artists introduced in this volume are Bala Subramaniam, Sonia Khurana, Thukral &amp; Tagra, Baba Anand, Bharti Kher and Krinaraj Chonat.

New Delhi, New Wave

JHA, Radhika

Part of a whole gang of street artists--from Barry McGee to Swoon--who have broken into the art world in the last decade or so, Phil Frost's signature style is a funky tribalism--Hawaii by way of New York City--infused with a quirky sense of art history and design. In the 1990s, Frost honed his skills by painting walls, found objects and street detritus with his intricate, compulsive and highly evolved form of tagging. Frost's gallery exhibitions are crowded affairs, filled with wildly patterned totemic objects and baseball bats while the walls are stacked with colorful mixed media paintings. He crafts his painstaking paintings by collaging layers of found imagery on grounds of symmetrical black-and-white patterning, which he paints with correction fluid, and that often morph into language-like glyphs or symbols. Frost states, "I believe [my work] is indigenous to myself. I believe that within every person there is an indigenous expression of themselves." Including an essay by New York journalist Carlo McCormick and notorious lowbrow artist Pusshead, this is Frost's first monograph, and an invaluable introduction to the evolution of his style.

Phil Frost

McCormick, Carlo

Pushead

This cloth-covered paperback with foldout poster jacket presents Italian photographer Maurizio Montagna's black-and-white series Billboards. Each of Montagna's photographs captures a billboard devoid of advertisement and, surrounding it, a landscape--sometimes densely urban, other times sparse, lonely and anonymous.

Maurizio Montagna: Billboards

Valtorta, Roberta

Curti, Denis

Schlüter, Maik

Zanot, Francesco

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