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ASIA SOCIETY
Sarah Sze: Infinite Line
Foreword by Vishakha Desai. Preface by Melissa Chiu. Text by Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka, Saskia Sassen.
Sarah Sze erects vertiginous sculptural universes from common consumer products such as aspirin, foam, ladders, Q-Tips, plastic spoons, notepads, trash baskets, thimbles and wrapped candies. Always responsive to surrounding space, Sze’s rhizomatic works are sometimes described as installation rather than sculpture, but an equally close or closer relationship occurs with drawing, the focus of the Asia Society Museum’s major Sze exhibition opening in December 2011, and this new hardcover volume published for the occasion. Infinite Line is the first publication to address the relationship of Sze’s sculpture to drawing, and to explore the influence of East Asian artistic traditions on her sensibility. “How do you make a sculpture that acts like a drawing?” Sze asks with these works. “How do you make a drawing that acts like a sculpture?” Born in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, Sarah Sze was initially trained in architecture. She received a BA from Yale University (1991) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1997). Sze has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art, and in the 48th Venice Bienniale and the 2009 Biennale de Lyon. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003. Currently based in New York, she teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Featured image, reproduced from Infinite Line, Asia Society Museum's new monograph on Sarah Sze, is the 2009 collage work "Guggenheim as a Ruin." In a conversation with Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu, published in the book, Sze comments, "For me the entire experience of viewing a work is always based on a kind of circulation or choreography through the space. This is something that I think comes from an architectural way of seeing. There's a consideration of how the viewer will see it at every point - even what ones sees peripherally when looking at other things. If I'm in a group show I always want to find out how you enter, what you will see first, what leads up to your experience of the work, and then what you will see last. The viewer's perspective and how information is revealed to viewers as they move through time and space are for me actually what the experience of the work is always about."
"Drawing is really the meat and potatoes of most people’s artwork in terms of recording information and trying to figure things out. The first thing most of us do is learn how to use a pencil—drawing is the first thing you do artistically. I think for me drawing comes in many forms. Drawing is a tool in many ways. It’s making a model. It’s about investigating and describing. Drawings can literally be information to be interpreted; like strict architectural drawings they can be conceptual and relay a larger abstract idea or a movement. They can create the illusion of three-dimensional space. They can be pure mark and lines. All of these things are interesting to me. One of the things that I was playing around with in the studio with the drawings I’m working on now is using things like eye charts because eye charts involve perspective—by necessity and design they are about seeing and distance. In using letters of varying sizes, the chart employs a layered or shifting perspective much like Chinese paintings. This, together with your actual distance from the chart, helps us understand our ability to see. It is a drawing of space and in space that describes the way we see. It is interesting to me to think about the many things that drawings can do that a painting or a photograph can’t do. Even though I primarily have made sculpture, it’s always interesting to see what one can do in one medium that you one can’t do in another."
-Sarah Sze, in conversation with Melissa Chiu, excerpted from Infinite Line
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.25 x 12.25 in. / 144 pgs / 115 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $65 ISBN: 9780878481132 PUBLISHER: Asia Society AVAILABLE: 10/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: *not available
Published by Asia Society. Foreword by Vishakha Desai. Preface by Melissa Chiu. Text by Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka, Saskia Sassen.
Sarah Sze erects vertiginous sculptural universes from common consumer products such as aspirin, foam, ladders, Q-Tips, plastic spoons, notepads, trash baskets, thimbles and wrapped candies. Always responsive to surrounding space, Sze’s rhizomatic works are sometimes described as installation rather than sculpture, but an equally close or closer relationship occurs with drawing, the focus of the Asia Society Museum’s major Sze exhibition opening in December 2011, and this new hardcover volume published for the occasion. Infinite Line is the first publication to address the relationship of Sze’s sculpture to drawing, and to explore the influence of East Asian artistic traditions on her sensibility. “How do you make a sculpture that acts like a drawing?” Sze asks with these works. “How do you make a drawing that acts like a sculpture?”
Born in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, Sarah Sze was initially trained in architecture. She received a BA from Yale University (1991) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1997). Sze has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art, and in the 48th Venice Bienniale and the 2009 Biennale de Lyon. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003. Currently based in New York, she teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts.
