Nioh is brutal action game series from Team NINJA and Koei Tecmo Games. In the age of samurai, a lone traveler lands on the shores of Japan. He must fight his way through the vicious warriors and supernatural Yokai that infest the land in order to find that which he seeks. Nioh & Nioh 2: Official Artworks collects the fantastic artwork behind the challenging video game franchise. Included are character artwork, monster designs, key art, rough concepts and more! Plus, dive deep into the world of Nioh through detailed character profiles and a complete guide to the weapons, armor, and items of the games.

The British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is famed for his idiosyncratic mode of depicting the human figure. Thirty years after his death, his working methods remain underexplored. New research on the Francis Bacon Studio Archive at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, sheds light on the genesis of his works, namely the photographic source material he collected in his studios, on which he consistently based his paintings. The book brings together the artist's pictorial springboards for the first time, delineating and interpreting recurring patterns and methods in his preparatory work and adoption of photographic material. In addition, it correctly locates 'chance' as a driving force in Bacon's working method and qualifies the significance of photography for the painter.

The drawings of Israeli artist Eran Shakine may look carefree and casual, but their message is serious: Muslims, Christians, and Jews share a history. They are linked through Abraham's sons Ishmael, an ancestor of the Muslims, and Isaac, an ancestor of the Jews, as well as through Jesus, born a Jew. As Shakine demonstrates in this new collection of his work, Muslims, Christians, and Jews have a great deal in common. Eran Shakine: Knocking on Heaven's Door presents new large-format oilstick drawings depicting Muslims, Christians, and Jews as an indistinguishable trio involved in actions that are both profound and humorous. In doing so, he reveals both the diversity and the similarity of the three and offers his own highly individual view of these world religions. Shakine's work argues that though they may have many differences, they share one thought: when they knock at heaven's door, they all hope to find the love of God. The result is a moving, sometimes witty, and always powerful collection of drawings that speak to many conflicts in the world today.

Celebrate the history and explore the unique universe of tokidoki in this 400-page monographTokidoki, which translates to “sometimes” in Japanese, is an internationally recognized and iconic lifestyle brand based on the vision of Italian artist Simone Legno. Since debuting in 2005, tokidoki has amassed a cult-like following for its larger-than-life characters and has emerged as a sought-after global lifestyle brand. Tokidoki has managed to develop commercial public collaborations with brands and organizations like Sephora, Levi's, MLB, the San Francisco Giants, and T-Mobile, while also developing more artistic partnerships with Karl Lagerfeld and the Guggenheim museum, and crossovers with other iconic pop culture characters like Barbie, Hello Kitty, Marvel heroes, and Peanuts.

As his personal circumstances move in constant flux, Ai Weiwei remains a cultural magnet. Renowned for his political activism and social media activity almost as much as for his social interventions, contemporary approach to the readymade, and knowledge of Chinese traditional crafts, Ai's fame extends throughout and beyond the art world. Drawn from TASCHEN's limited Collector's Edition, this monograph explores each of Ai's career phases up until his release from Chinese custody. It features extensive visual material to trace Ai's development from his early New York days right through to his recent practice. Focus moments include his international breakthrough in the early 2000s, his porcelain Sunflower Seeds at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, his response to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, and his police detention in 2011. With behind-the-scenes studio pictures, production shots, and numerous statements derived from exclusive interviews with Ai, we gain privileged access to the artist's process, influences, and importance. The book includes texts from Uli Sigg, Ai's longtime friend and former Swiss ambassador to China and Roger M. Buergel, who curated the 2007 documenta and hosted the artist's Fairytale piece. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

One of the major literary works by Andy Warhol, the subject of the new Netflix documentary The Andy Warhol Diaries, executive produced by Ryan MurphyConceptually unique, hilarious, and frightening, a: A Novel is the perfect literary manifestation of Andy Warhol's sensibility. In the late sixties, Warhol set out to turn a trade book into a piece of pop art, and the result was this astonishing account of the artists, superstars, addicts, and freaks who made up the Factory milieu. Created from audiotapes recorded in and around the Factory, a: A Novel begins with the fabulous Ondine popping several amphetamines and then follows its characters as they converse with inspired, speed-driven wit and cut swaths through the clubs, coffee shops, hospitals, and whorehouses of 1960s Manhattan.

Learn the skills to set any scene or capture any mood. With this book, your manga drawings will spring to life and leap off the page! Drawing Action Scenes and Characters is most suited to digital artists, but the tips and techniques in this book are applicable to illustrators of all schools and persuasions. No matter where you're at in your development as a manga master, this companion volume helps bring your skills to the next level. Follow along through the forty mini-lessons, created and guided by experts tapping into years of experience in the Japanese animation and entertainment industries. Open new pathways to your visual storytelling possibilities as your characters find themselves in increasingly complex and compellingly rendered scenarios. Tuttle's How to Create Manga series guides users through the process of reaching a professional-looking final drawing through actual sketch progressions, practical tips and caution on common missteps to avoid. Other books in the series include How to Create Manga: Drawing the Human Body, How to Create Manga: Drawing Facial Expressions and How to Create Manga: Drawing Clothing and Accessories.

Rachel Owen's hauntingly beautiful illustrations for Dante's Inferno take a radically new approach to representing the world of Dante's famous poem. The images combine the artist's deep cultural and historical understanding of 'The Divine Comedy' and its artistic legacy with her unique talent for collage and printmaking. These illustrations, casting the viewer as a first-person pilgrim through the underworld, prompt us to rethink Dante's poem through their novel perspective and visual language. Owen's work, held in the Bodleian Library and published here for the first time, illustrates the complete cycle of thirty-four cantos of the Inferno with one image per canto. The illustrations are accompanied by essays contextualising Owen's work and supplemented by six illustrations intended for the unfinished Purgatorio series. Fiona Whitehouse provides details of the techniques employed by the artist, Peter Hainsworth situates Owen's work in the field of modern Dante illustration and David Bowe offers a commentary on the illustrations as gateways to Dante's poem. Jamie McKendrick and Bernard O'Donoghue's translations of episodes from the 'Inferno' provide complementary artistic interpretations of Dante's poem, while reflections from colleagues and friends commemorate Owen's life and work as an artist, scholar and teacher. This stunning collection is an important contribution to both Dante scholarship and illustration.

Contemporary art has never been so popular - but the art world is changing. In a landscape of increasing globalization there is growing interest in questions over the nature of contemporary art today, and the identity of who is controlling its future. In the midst of this, contemporary art continues to be a realm of freedom where artists shock, break taboos, flout generally received ideas, and switch between confronting viewers with works of great emotional profundity and jaw-dropping triviality. In this Very Short Introduction Julian Stallabrass gives a clear view on the diverse and rapidly moving scene of contemporary art. Exploring art's striking globalisation from the 1990s onwards, he analyses how new regions and nations, such as China, have leapt into astonishing prominence, over-turning the old Euro-American dominance on aesthetics. Showing how contemporary art has drawn closer to fashion and the luxury goods market as artists have become accomplished marketers of their work, Stallabrass discusses the reinvention of artists as brands. This new edition also considers how once powerful art criticism has mutated into a critical and performative writing at which many artists excel. Above all, behind the insistent rhetoric of freedom and ambiguity in art, Stallabrass explores how big business and the super-rich have replaced the state as the primary movers of the contemporary art scene, especially since the financial crisis, and become a powerful new influence over the art world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A larger-than-life figure in the design community with a client list to match, Paula Scher turned her first major project as a partner at Pentagram into a formative twenty-five-year relationship with the Public Theater in New York. This behind-the-scenes account of the relationship between Scher and "the Public," as it's affectionately known, chronicles over two decades of brand and identity development and an evolving creative process in a unique "autobiography of graphic design." New Yorkers, designers, and theater fans everywhere will be thrilled to find hundreds of Scher's posters, including those for Hamilton, Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, and numerous Shakespeare in the Park productions, collected in this one-of-a-kind volume along with other printed and process-related matter. Essays by two of the theater's artistic directors, George C. Wolfe and Oskar Eustis, and design critics Steven Heller and Ellen Lupton contextualize Scher's dynamic typographic treatment.

The Social Design Reader explores the ways in which design can be a catalyst for social change. Bringing together key texts of the last fifty years, editor Elizabeth Resnick traces the emergence of the notion of socially responsible design. This volume represents the authentic voices of the thinkers, writers and designers who are helping to build a 'canon' of informed literature which documents the development of the discipline. The Social Design Reader is divided into three parts. Section 1: Making a Stand includes an introduction to the term 'social design' and features papers which explore its historical underpinnings. Section 2: Creating the Future documents the emergence of social design as a concept, as a nascent field of study, and subsequently as a rapidly developing professional discipline, and Section 3: A Sea Change is made up of papers acknowledging social design as a firmly established practice. Contextualising section introductions are provided to aid readers in understanding the original source material, while summary boxes clearly articulate how each text fits with the larger milieu of social design theory, methods, and practice.

The first book to explore the fascinating career and fantasy-driven worlds created by the acclaimed Argentinean artist Adrian Villar Rojas's works concoct imaginary realms. Usually made from clay, his colossal installations are transitory and so cannot be collected, as they disappear or decay over time. His practice confronts the public with ideas of obsolescence and extinction, but also with the possibilities of humankind and its endless imagination. This is the first book to include all of Villar Rojas' most significant projects, featured in international biennials such as Venice, Documenta, Shanghai, and others.

Beginning with the first comprehensive account of the discourse of appropriation that dominated the art world in the late 1970s and 1980s, Art After Appropriation suggests a matrix of inflections and refusals around the culture of taking or citation, each chapter loosely correlated with one year of the decade between 1989 and 1999. The opening chapters show how the Second World culture of the USSR gave rise to a new visibility for photography during the dissolution of the Soviet Union around 1989. Welchman examines how genres of ethnography, documentary and travel are crossed with fictive performance and social improvisation in the videos of Steve Fagin. He discusses how hybrid forms of subjectivity are delivered by a new critical narcissism, and how the Korean-American artist, Cody Choi converts diffident gestures of appropriation from the logic of material or stylistic annexation into continuous incorporated events. Art After Appropriation also examines the creation of public art from covert actions and social feedback, and how bodies participate in their own appropriation. Art After Appropriation concludes with the advent of the rainbow net, an imaginary icon that governs the spaces of interactivity, proliferation and media piracy at the end of the millennium. John Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Modernism Relocated (1995) and Invisible Colors (1997); and editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), and a forthcoming three-volume anthology of the writings of LA artist MIke Kelley. Welchman has contributed to numerous journals, magazines, museum catalogues and newspapers, including Artforum; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; International Herald Tribune; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Haus der Kunst, Munich

How can social theory help us all design solutions to address the social, political and ecological challenges that confront us, and build more sustainable communities? Design professions have typically been associated with intervention and action, while social science has long been associated with thought and reflection. Design and social thought are too frequently considered distinct in terms of how theories can be applied in practice. Design and the Social Imagination brings together the creative, action-oriented sensibility of design with the reflective, analytical capacities of the social sciences to offer models, ideas and strategies for shaping the future of the world we live in. In a world of global economic inequality, racism, and environmental degradation, designing with an understanding of our social reality is increasingly crucial to our survival. Matthew DelSesto explores current practices and discourses in areas of urban design, design for social innovation, environmental design, co-design, service design, and more, illustrating how thoughtful design can contribute in a more productive way. Drawing on a range of theory and practice from radical social thinkers C. Wright Mills, Patrick Geddes, Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois, his book shows us how design and the social sciences can interact in order to intervene in the crises we face today.

The first comprehensive survey to explore the rich and complex history of contemporary Korean art - an incredibly timely topic Starting with the armistice that divided the Korean Peninsula in 1953, this one-of-a-kind book spotlights the artistic movements and collectives that have flourished and evolved throughout Korean culture over the past seven decades - from the 1950s avant-garde through to the feminist scene in the 1970s, the birth of the Gwangju Biennale in the 1990s, the lesser known North Korean art scene, and all the artists who have emerged to secure a place in the international art world.

Elmgreen & Dragset's constructed environments have been celebrated all over the world for their mischievous, cerebral, and accessible nature. This is the first comprehensive presentation of the duo's work, from their early performative pieces in the late 1990s to their most recent public projects Drawing from disciplines as divergent as institutional critique, social politics, performance, design, and architecture, Elmgreen & Dragset's work reconfigures the familiar with characteristic and subversive wit. Their sculptures and installations, also known as 'Powerless Structures', have redefined what it means to experience art - the cover features their work Van Gogh's Ear, a sculpture in the form of a swimming pool, which is located on Fifth Avenue in New York at the entrance to the Rockefeller Center. This book includes all of their most significant projects, from the transformation of New York's Bohen Foundation into a subway station in 2004, to the siting of a fake Prada boutique in the Texan desert in 2005, and the installation of the statue of a child on a rocking horse on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2012. Elmgreen & Dragset is the latest addition to the acclaimed Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series.

The Lost Thing uses the house as a metaphor in which the various rooms are images of mental states, memories and displacements. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is structured as a labyrinthine wandering from room to room showing an experimental exploration of installation art's ability to articulate existential issues through a poetic architectural adaptation. Hanne Tyrmi (1954) is a Norwegian artist who has been active in the art scene since the 1980s. As an artist, she is totally unafraid of using a variety of visual languages to make her point: she is a sort of "polyglot" with a reputation for creating sculptures, installations, videos and photographic works that invade our emotions like a benign virus. Her work is infectious and any contact with it sets in motion a metamorphosis that brings about a healthy resistance to the emotional malaise of our time. A strong sense of adventure can be felt in her works, something she learnt from her travels around the world, without fear and with an open mind. She lived and worked in Brazil, South Africa and India for years; more recently she moved her studio from Oslo to Xiamen in order to work in Chinese workshops. Hanne has ventured into the world of art fearless of its conventional canons and she is willing to address issues and subjects many artists would shy away from. Her curiosity is focused on how one's mind and body behave when confronted by certain images and environments, i.e. on the emotional reactions of the viewers.

Architecture and the Virtual is a study of architecture as it is reflected in the work of seven contemporary artists, working with the tools of our post-digital age. The book maps the convergence of virtual space and contemporary conceptual art and is an anthropological exploration of artists who deal with transformable space and work through analogue means of image production. Marta Jecu builds her inquiry around interviews with artists and curators in order to explore how these works create the experience of the virtual in architecture. Performativity and neo-conceptualism play important roles in this process and in the efficiency with which these works act in the social space.

My Generation is a striking and appealing new volume that presents 75 artworks by 27 young Chinese artists, all born after 1976 after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Covering all media and types of production, their work opens a window onto a new China, a society that has undergone rapid industrialisation and globalisation in the past two decades. Artists and collectives featured include Birdhead, Chi Peng, Chen Ke, Chen Wei, Cui Jie, Double Fly, Guo Hongwei, Hu Xiaoyun, Huang Ran, Irrelevant Commission, Jin Shan, Li Qing, Liang Yuanwei, Liang Yue, Liu Di, Lu Fang, Lu Yang, Ma Qiusha, Made In, Qiu Xiaofei, Song Kun, Shi Zhiying, Sun Xun, Wang Yuyang, Yan Xing, Zhang Ding, Zhou Yilun. Contents of the book: Foreward by Todd Smith, Director, Tampa Museum of Art, Florida; Curator's Preface & Acknowledgements by Barbara Pollack; Young, Gifted and Chinese by Barbara Pollack; Essay 2 by Li Zhenhua; Main Catalogue/Plates section: 75 artworks; Brief captions for comparative images 1-para; Artist biographies; Selected Exhibitions and Publications; Notes on curator; Index; Photo credits.