A lavishly illustrated volume showcasing contemporary Korean art. On the biggest international stages, from the Venice Biennale to museums around the world, contemporary art from Korea excites and challenges viewers wherever it is shown. In Extreme Beauty, leading curators and critics explore the complex creative practices of some of the most exciting artists active in Korea and internationally. From the ultra-minimal to the hyper-conceptual, each of these twelve Korean artists and groups is a highly original figure, having spent decades developing their unique styles and approaches to making art. Readers will get an inside look at the complex processes behind these artworks through this generously illustrated volume. Extreme Beauty features artists such as Koo Jeong A, Lee Dong-gi, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Lee Wan, Meekyoung Shin, San Keum Koh, Seulgi Lee, Mire Lee, Kang Seung Lee, Yeesookyung, Nam Tchun Mo, and Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho and is distributed by NUS Press for ArtAsiaPacific, Hong Kong.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

Extreme Beauty: 12 Contemporary Korean Artists

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

National University of Singapore Press

Product Description 
This book is distributed by NUS Press for the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila, and ArtAsiaPacific, Hong Kong.\nMarian Pastor Roces is one of the most original thinkers in Southeast Asia addressing the interactions of politics, privilege, state patronage, creativity, tradition, and contemporary art. An art historian, museum director, and cultural theorist, she has shown a keen sensitivity to the relations of power between creators and mediators of art and culture. 
Gathering is the first-ever collection of essays by Roces, bringing together key pieces in a body of work that is sustained and unrelenting in its commitment to critique in a variety of contexts. Featuring an introduction by Rustom Bharucha, and a foreword by Elena Mirano, the collection presents forty-three essays that were originally published between 1974 and 2018.\nReview \n“Eruditely and meticulously composed.” 
 -- Mariecar Jara-Puyod ― 
Gulf Today 
 About the Author \nMarian Pastor Roces is an art historian, museum expert, and cultural theorist.\nRustom Bharucha is an independent writer, director, dramaturg and cultural critic based in Kolkata, India.\nElena Mirano is professor emeritus at the College of Arts and Letters at the University of the Philippines

Gathering: Political Writing on Art and Culture

Roces, Marian Pastor

Singapore is the world’s second-largest trading port and an economic epicenter for the region, making it an ideal point of departure to examine place and the intersection between locality and the global that occurs in labor and the flow of capital. With this in mind, it is fitting that the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) chose “Place.Labour.Capital.” as the framework of its first three years in existence. During these opening years, artists and creators used this theme to connect cultural production and artistic research to broader political and social issues. This extensive publication weaves together critical essays and contributions by curators and academics with former artists-in-residence at NTU CCA, and documents past exhibitions in photographs. Place.Labour.Capital. serves equally as a rear-view mirror that enables an art institution to review its own history and its position in the time of global art. Drawing connections across disciplines and fields of practice, this will allow readers to encounter, experience, and engage critically with ideas that bear a sense of the urgency and have relevance in the wider social sphere.

Place.Labour.Capital.

Rujoiu, Anca

Published by the Singapore Art Museum T. K. Sabapathy has been writing on the art of Southeast Asia for more than four decades, as a critic, curator, and art historian. He is a penetrating critic and ardent advocate for the art and artists of Singapore and Malaysia. His art historical methods, critical documentation, deep dialogue with artists, and detailed explication of their works have set the course of art discourse in the region. Writing the Modern is the first collection of Sabapathy’s work, featuring pieces that represent the scope and depth of his output and highlight his most important and influential writings. At the same time, it is a survey of the vast changes in the landscape of art in the region over the period. Sabapathy chronicles the shift in Asian art from a predominantly nationalist/modernist mode to a global contemporary style. Those new to his work will find this the ideal introduction to his oeuvre. And his longtime fans will find this book the perfect opportunity for review and renewed consideration of his work. Ultimately, it’s a collection sure to fuel a new generation of modern and contemporary art writing, research, and exhibition making.

Writing the Modern: Selected Texts on Art & Art History in Singapore, Malaysia & Southeast Asia, 1973–2015

Sabapathy, T. K.

A much-needed resource on the practice of public art commissions and community engagement through the arts in urban Asia. Distributed for the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art This book documents a major public art commission in Singapore, featuring works by artists Dan Graham, Zul Mahmod, Tomás Saraceno, and Yinka Shonibare, and it represents a unique collaboration between Nanyang Technology University Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Mapletree Investments--a Singaporean state-owned property developer with global operations. Essays and interviews with the artists tell the story of the regional histories, urban politics, and collaboration that went into the successful creation of a public space, and refer to the practice of place-making that integrates landscape architecture, urban planning, and cultural management.&nbsp;Culture City. Culture Scape.&nbsp;is a much-needed resource on the role that art can play in public education and social corporate investment in urban Asia.&nbsp;

Culture City. Culture Scape.

Sculpture

<div>For years, the study of how culture operates in colonial contexts was dominated by the ideas of transmission and influence. Yet the more we learn, the less useful those concepts seem to be. This collection deliberately complicates the binary of colonizer and colonized in order to establish a more effective framework for understanding. The contributors address a wide range of questions, rooted in specific colonial experiences: How can a controversy about forms of deference in Java reveal tensions around colonial policies and the rise of nationalism? What was Vietnamese about the French colonial governor's palace in Hanoi? What can the circulation of jazz in Asia tell us about its evolution, circuits of exchange, colonial culture, and its appropriation? Through such inquiries, the volume traces the multilinear trajectories of the flow of decorative objects, architectural styles, photographs, sartorial practices, music, deference rituals, and ethnographic knowledge, in a transimperial framework within and beyond Southeast Asia and Europe. Highlighting a wide range of actors along with their motivations and interactions, this volume treats cultural heritage as dynamic processes.</div>

Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary: Global Encounters via Southeast Asia

Music

When Singapore declared independence in 1965, it faced the monumental task of building a military from scratch. Aristocracy of Armed Talent tells the story of the development of the Singapore Armed Forces through a collective portrait of its leaders. This book is based on interviews with twenty-eight flag officers, offering a firsthand look at Singapore’s military from the very leaders who helped shape it. It addresses the challenges Singapore faced in building its officer corps and encouraging individuals to stay and make a career out of military service. In a society where the majority Chinese population traditionally devalued military careers, and where military service was associated with foreign occupiers and colonizers, Singapore had to learn to build a culture of leadership for its armed forces. It also dispels some of the myths that have shrouded military culture in the country. As former flag officers are often recruited into senior civil service and political roles, understating the military elite culture is central to understanding Singapore’s politics. This book provides a rare window on an exceptional and globally influential institution.

Aristocracy of Armed Talent: The Military Elite in Singapore

History

Chan, Samuel Ling Wei

Asia

<div>Until the mid-1950s nearly all of the sea between the far-flung islands of the Indonesian archipelago was open to ships of all nations, but in 1957, the Indonesian government declared that it had absolute sovereignty over all the waters lying within straight baselines drawn between the outermost islands of Indonesia.&nbsp; In this single step, Indonesia made its lands and seas a unified entity for the first time, a claim formally recognized in 1982 by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Sovereignty and the Sea explores how Indonesia succeeded in its extraordinary claim despite its low international profile. John G. Butcher and R. E. Elson reveal that at the heart of Indonesia's archipelagic campaign was a small group of Indonesian diplomats whose dogged persistence, negotiating skills, and willingness to make difficult compromises resulted in Indonesia becoming the greatest archipelagic state in the world. &nbsp;</div>

Sovereignty and the Sea: How Indonesia Became an Archipelagic State

Elson, R.E.

Butcher, John G

For most of us, work is a basic daily fact of life. But that simple fact encompasses an incredibly wide range of experiences. Hard at Work takes readers into the day-to-day work experiences of more than fifty working people in Singapore who hold jobs that run from the ordinary to the unusual: from ice cream vendors, baristas, police officers and funeral directors to academic ghostwriters, temple flower sellers, and Thai disco girl agents. Through first-person narratives based on detailed interviews, vividly augmented with color photographs, Hard at Work reminds us of the everyday labor that continually goes on around us, and that every job can reveal something interesting if we just look closely enough. It shows us too the ways inequalities of status and income are felt and internalized in this highly globalized society.

Hard at Work: Life in Singapore

Politics & Social Sciences

Sasges, Gerard

Wen, Ng Shi

Sociology

The role of clientism, political machines, and money in grassroots electioneering in the Philippines has been much analyzed by those who study the subject, but never as extensively as Allen Hicken, Edward Aspinall, and Meredith Weiss do in Electoral Dynamics in the Philippines. Combining in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in localities across the Philippines during the 2016 elections with polling data and national comparative data, this study sheds light on the organization of elections and electioneering across the Philippines. How do candidates choose to appeal to voters, and how do they get out the vote? How do voters respond to different kinds of appeals? How important are patronage and clientism? What are the networks within which patronage is delivered? What do the political machines look like in elections influenced by social media? The book identifies commonalities and differences across the Philippines while speaking to current debates in political science about elections in developing democracies, the structure and organization of clientelism, and the role of money in elections.

Electoral Dynamics in the Philippines: Money Politics, Patronage and Clientelism at the Grassroots

Business & Money

International

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