The work by the award-winning, emerging South African artist

Chris Soal is a South African artist born in 1994 and has situated his practice between Johannesburg and Cape Town. Soal’s studio-based work is sculptural in its output, working with objects and materials in ways that show a conceptual engagement with the contexts and histories of the objects but that also re-enforce the body as a site for knowledge reception and production. Soal’s works seek to make a poetic statement through the simplest of means, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perceptual habits while challenging core societal preconceptions of value and hierarchy.

Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, along with concrete, rebar, electric fencing cable, sandpaper, and other industrial materials, the artist intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny. Soal’s works can be considered social abstractions influenced by a reinterpreted Arte Povera that is deeply rooted in and reflective of his upbringing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working symbiotically with his materials, Soal utilises the inherent physical characteristics of the objects to transform them through processes of aggregation, combination, and erosion. He seeks to interrogate views of nature and culture as a binary concept, foregrounding pressing ecological concerns by repositioning the viewer as an active agent within the contemporary environment. Despite the artificiality of his materials, Soal’s process allows them to take on biomorphic qualities or evoke natural phenomena, expressing his interest in their phenomenological quality.

Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th-20th Centuries explores women's and men's contributions to the arts and gendered visual representations in China, Korea, and Japan from the premodern through modern eras. A critical introduction and nine essays consider how threads of continuity and exchanges between the cultures of East Asia, Europe, and the United States helped to shape modernity in this region, in the process revealing East Asia as a vital component of the trans-Pacific world. The essays are organized into three themes: representations of femininity, women as makers, and constructions of gender, and they consider examples of architecture, painting, woodblock prints and illustrated books, photography, and textiles. Contributors are: Lara C. W. Blanchard, Kristen L. Chiem, Charlotte Horlyck, Ikumi Kaminishi, Nayeon Kim, Sunglim Kim, Radu Leca, Elizabeth Lillehoj, Ying-chen Peng, and Christina M. Spiker. Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th-20th Centuries is now available in paperback for individual customers.