Zhang Huan has emerged as one of the most important artists of the past decade, a fearless explorer of the limits of the human body and a key figure in the flourishing Chinese art scene. His earliest performances, including 12 Square Meters, 65 Kilograms, and To Raise the Water-Level in a Fishpond, subjected his body to grueling tests of endurance while addressing the relationship between physical endurance and spiritual tranquility. Zhang 's move to New York in 1998 contributed to establish himself as a widely recognized figure in the international contemporary art world, staging performances in several cities around the globe, including Sydney, Rome, Shanghai and Hamburg where he reflected on his experiences in the cities he visited and his ethnic identity in a foreign land. In 2006 Zhang established a studio in Shanghai, where he began to seek a greater connection to Chinese heritage and history. This marked a new direction in his work, as he turned from performance to sculpture, painting, and installation. Through creating large-scale sculpture in diverse media, such as ash from local Buddhist temples, and with found objects, such as doors from the Chinese countryside homes, Zhang Huan continues to explore new ways to render his interest in the body and its language. A significant aspect of Zhang's new work revolves around his interest in Buddhism. Although Buddhist themes figured indirectly into his early work, they took on a more prominent role after a visit to Tibet in 2005. There, Zhang began to collect fragments of Buddhist sculptures, which he then used as models for massive copper figures. Upon his return to Shanghai, Zhang Huan began to collect ash from local Buddhist temples for use in sculptures and paintings. The use of burnt incense, the product of religious offerings, strengthens the link between his art and Buddhist practices.

Performance Now charts the development of performance by visual artists across six continents since the turn of the 21st century. It reveals how live art, so integral to the history of art in the 20th century, has become an increasingly essential vehicle for communicating ideas across the globe in the new millennium. Renowned authority RoseLee Goldberg discusses the key themes in performance art practice, from beauty, global citizenship and political activism to performance's intersection with film and technology, dance, theatre and architecture. Each chapter is followed by illustrated profiles of the world's best-known performance artists, accompanied by extended captions that assess the importance of specific works to the practice of international performance art. The book concludes with an extensive reference section. Providing a visually exciting and stimulating overview of this most varied art form, Performance Now is the go-to reference for artists, art students and historians as well as avant-garde theatre and movie goers.

This book comes in three different color patterns (all with the same cover design). The most comprehensive book devoted to the incomparable and iconic work of Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama, now in her eighties, has become a vital force in contemporary art and an influence on generations of artists. Arriving in New York City in 1958 from her native Japan, she embarked on a series of works that forged a new visual vocabulary-the Net paintings, which were composed of scores of small, thickly painted loops spanning large canvases. Her singular approach to art making continued in other extraordinary bodies of work, including the phallic soft sculptures which she later incorporated into full-scale environments. In 1973 she returned to Japan, where she lives and works today. Since then, she has created dazzling walk-in mirror rooms and her now-famous pumpkin sculptures, as well as writing poetry and novels. In this book-created in close collaboration with Kusama and her Tokyo studio-the breadth and import of this watershed artist's career are considered in depth. In addition to studies of the development of her artistic vocabularies across different media, the book includes ephemera, sketches, and photographs from the artist's extensive archive that have never been seen before. The publication is timed to coincide with the artist's major touring retrospective, which makes its American debut at the Whitney Museum in New York in summer 2012, as well as with the much-anticipated collaboration with powerhouse fashion brand Louis Vuitton. Contributors include: Leslie Camhi, RoseLeeGoldberg, Laura Hoptman, Chris Kraus, Arthur Lubow, Kevin McGarry, Louise Neri, Akira Tatehata, and Olivier Zahm.

This pioneering book has now been expanded with a new chapter that brings it into the second decade of the twenty-first century, mapping the global rise of performance to the present day. RoseLee Goldberg explores contemporary artists approaches to politics, tradition, social engagement, and the art world itself, while evaluating the changing status of performance and its ever-increasing relevance to artists and audiences. Featuring recent work by leading performance artists such as Marina Abramovic, Walid Raad, Francis Alys, Pierre Huyghe, Tino Sehgal, and Sharon Hayes, the book covers a century of the medium. This new edition also includes an updated foreword and an expanded reading list.

In Shirin Neshat's photographs, Persian calligraphic script is transcribed over black and white depictions of the exposed faces, hands, and feet of Iranian women. In her video works, swarms of women in black hijabs ululate, a man in a white dress shirt and black pants sings to an all-male audience, and a lone, nearly invisible woman chants to herself in a darkened house. Always aesthetically compelling, Neshat's work is equally thematically ambiguous, never settling on a simple or singular meaning, never offering social commentary within prescribed limits. Though focused on the particulars of sex segregation and the suppression of women in contemporary Iran, Neshat underscores the relevance of her poetic, disturbing, moving ensembles to a broader culture. This monograph documents and provides critical insight into the evolution of her work.

"RoseLee Goldberg amazed with PERFORMA 05, billed as the city's first biennial of 'visual art performance.' Working with a tiny staff, a shoestring budget and no institutional affiliation, Ms. Goldberg put together a program that covered a lot of aesthetic bases--old school, just out of school, high-tech, no-tech--and encompassed more than 60 scheduled events all of which makes the prospect of PERFORMA 07 shine with promise." --Roberta Smith, the "New York Times" This volume is the first in a series of important publications drawing content and inspiration from the "PERFORMA" biennial. Featuring inventive documentation by the 100 artists who made the first "PERFORMA" so extraordinary, it offers an exhilarating view into contemporary visual art performance and "performs" as a collective artists' journal might. Vibrant photographs of each artist's performance are accompanied by their scripts, sketches and storyboards, providing unique insight into process and upending conventions around archiving performance. Lively interviews with some of the most significant artists of our time--including Francis Alys, Tamy Ben-Tor, Jesper Just, Marina Abramovic, Gelitin, Laurie Simmons and Mike Smith--appear alongside context-setting essays by some of our most inspired young curators. "PERFORMA" founder RoseLee Goldberg, who pioneered the study of performance art with her seminal book "Performance Art from Futurism to the Present" (1979), presents an authoritative introduction addressing the genre's many forms--radio broadcast, dance, live installation, new technologies, film and video, music, historic reconstructions and lecture-as-performance among them. "PERFORMA" is not only an invaluable reference, it is a new kind of guide to cultural life, a time capsule of this very moment in New York's eminent performance history, complete with profiles of the city's nonprofit biennial venues that, like this book, give ephemeral art a physical place in which to persist.