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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > Art styles not limited by date > Oriental art
Moving Still: Performative Photography in India explores themes of
migration, gender, religion and national identity through the lens
of modern and contemporary photography in India. While exploring
the early beginnings of photography in India with works from Ram
Singh II and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, the primary focus of this
publication is the lens-based practices of contemporary artists
such as Naveen Kishore, Atul Bhalla, Tejal Shah, Vivan Sundaram,
Sunil Gupta, Anita Dube and Pushpamala N. Artists rooted in the
diversity of cultures and multiplicity within the country, while at
the same time engaged in a global dialogue. The publication will
include profiles on each of the participating artists, a timeline
on the history of performative photography compiled by Critical
Collective, as well as feature essays by Diana Freundl, Associate
Curator, Asian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Gayatri Sinha,
art critic and curator, that together expand on the historical
importance and relevance of photography as an artistic medium in
India as well as the development of performative photography.
With its concentration on geometrical forms, Islamic design offers
a rich source of patterns. Many are taken Moorish Spain and the
traditional sites of the Middle East and North Africa, but this
book also includes patterns which have been used in mosques in
Great Britain. This book provides a photographic exploration of the
magnificent designs and analysis of the designs using clear
drawings provides designers and artists with ideas and techniques
for their own work.
Innovative artists in 1960s Japan who made art in the
"wilderness"-away from Tokyo, outside traditional norms, and with
little institutional support-with global resonances. 1960s Japan
was one of the world's major frontiers of vanguard art. As Japanese
artists developed diverse practices parallel to, and sometimes
antecedent to, their Western counterparts, they found themselves in
a new reality of "international contemporaneity" (kokusaiteki
dojisei). In this book Reiko Tomii examines three key figures in
Japanese art of the 1960s who made radical and inventive art in the
"wilderness"-away from Tokyo, outside traditional norms, and with
little institutional support. These practitioners are the
conceptualist Matsuzawa Yutaka, known for the principle of
"vanishing of matter" and the practice of "meditative
visualization" (kannen); The Play, a collective of "Happeners"; and
the local collective GUN (Group Ultra Niigata). The innovative work
of these artists included a visionary exhibition in Central Japan
of "formless emissions" organized by Matsuzwa; the launching of a
huge fiberglass egg-"an image of liberation"-from the southernmost
tip of Japan's main island by The Play; and gorgeous color field
abstractions painted by GUN on accumulating snow on the riverbeds
of the Shinano River. Pioneers in conceptualism, performance art,
land art, mail art, and political art, these artists delved into
the local and achieved global relevance. Making "connections" and
finding "resonances" between these three practitioners and artists
elsewhere, Tomii links their local practices to the global
narrative and illuminates the fundamentally "similar yet
dissimilar" characteristics of their work. In her reading, Japan
becomes a paradigmatic site of world art history, on the periphery
but asserting its place through hard-won international
contemporaneity.
In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global
circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes
generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial
networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting,
performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money,
culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of
commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and
continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With
a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the
expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that
received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in
the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to
demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as
we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts
directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores
how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to
shape-both physically and culturally-the new spaces in which they
found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how
artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to
produce a new way of framing the global.
Sulat ng Kaluluwa (Writing of the Soul) is the 2nd book by Ancient
Philippine Calligraphy (Baybayin) Artist, Kristian Kabuay. The book
features over 50 images of artwork and accompanying stories written
by people from around the world. The concept was for each person to
provide a word or name and write what it means to them. From the
word and story, Kristian created the art. Baybayin is a writing
system from the Philippines that's no longer in regular use. There
are only 3 remaining tribes that still use it.
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