From the Land of the Rising Sun

The Brittle Decade: Visualizing Japan in the 1930s

Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Text by John W. Dower, Anne Nishimura Morse, Jacqueline M. Atkins, Frederic A. Sharf.

Visualizing modernism in prewar Japan

PUBLISHER
MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9 x 9.5 in. / 208 pgs / 160 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 7/31/2012
Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 52   

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ISBN 9780878467693 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00 GBP £40.00

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Art of the Japanese Postcard

Masterpieces fom the Leonard A. Lauder Collection

Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Essays by Kendall H. Brown, Leonard A. Lauder, Anne Nishimura Morse and J. Thomas Rimer.

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Japan was a vital world center for postcard art. More than just casual mail pieces, these postcards were often designed by prominent artists and had a visual impact that belied their modest format. Remarkably beautiful examples of graphic design in their own right, they also recorded the shifting definitions of “East” and “West” at a time when such European currents as Art Nouveau began to show up in Japanese visual productions. Art of the Japanese Postcard presents 300 full-color examples of these cards, culled from the vast Leonard A. Lauder Collection. They are astonishing not only for their beauty and the quality of their printing, but also for the insight they provide into contemporary Japanese artistic practices--insights not relayed in standard histories that focus on painting and sculpture--as well as for the fluid interplay of European and Japanese modes. Authoritative essays by leading scholars of Japanese art and culture, plus a statement by the collector himself, highlight the design, development, and cultural function of these rarely studied, but highly influential and visually exciting, expressions of graphic genius.

PUBLISHER
MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8.5 x 9.5 in. / 288 pgs / 350 color / 20 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 4/2/2004
Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2004 p. 43   

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ISBN 9780878466689 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $55.00

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Modern Japanese Prints

The Twentieth Century

Published by Carnegie Museum Of Art.
Edited by Amanda T. Zehnder.

A selection of exemplary 20th-century Japanese woodblock prints from the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art

PUBLISHER
Carnegie Museum Of Art

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 10 x 9 in. / 200 pgs / 1050 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 7/31/2009
Out of stock indefinitely

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Catalog: FALL 2009 p. 43   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780880390491 TRADE
List Price: $34.95 CDN $45.95 GBP £30.00

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Yayoi Kusama

Published by D.A.P./Tate.
Edited by Frances Morris. Text by Jo Applin, Juliet Mitchell, Mignon Nixon, Midori Yamamura.

Accompanying the first major American retrospective exhibition of Yayoi Kusama's work, and an exhibition at Tate Modern in London, this volume offers a definitive monograph on Japan's most famous living artist. It features a wealth of works from all periods in Kusama's career, as well as essays by various international curators and critics, discussing Kusama's years in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and the psychoanalytic import of her art. Kusama's originality, innovation and sheer drive to make art have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades, encompassing painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance, installation and even product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York, and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city, becoming close with artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, and influencing many others along the way. It was in these years that Kusama was dubbed "the Polka Dot Princess," for her obsessive use of polka dots in installations and happenings. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition that she has recently achieved. Now in her ninth decade, Kusama's imagination remains fertile and productive, as she continues to devise dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-paints her ongoing series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings.
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She left Japan for New York at the age of 28, following a correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe, and was soon participating in the city's 1960s wave of happenings and avant-garde activities. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and began writing surrealistic novels and poetry. On November 12, 2008, Christie's New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.

PUBLISHER
D.A.P./Tate

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8.75 x 10.75 in. / 208 pgs / 195 color / 51 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/29/2012
Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 11   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781935202813 TRADE
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The Japanese Experience: Inevitable

Published by Hatje Cantz.
Artwork by Jun Hasegawa, Hiropon, Shintaro Miyake, Aya Takano, Yoshitomo Nara. Edited by Margrit Brehm. Contributions by Axel Heil. Text by Gregor Jansen, Takashi Murakami.

At first sight, it appears brand new, pure Tokyo pop. But The Japanese Experience: Inevitable reveals far more than the successful cloning of morphed manga motifs onto stretched canvas and museum walls. It represents eight positions in contemporary Japanese art and scrutinizes their complex visual vocabulary, noting references to Japanese and Western art traditions as frequently as the borrowing of mass culture motifs from the realms of manga and anime. Takashi Murakami's MR. DOB questions the place of contemporary art in our global society; Aya Takano's glowing watercolors combine Japanese sensitivity, issues of female identity, and sci-fi; Masahiko Kuwahara's mutant animals provide shades of softness and mysterious openness, and Yoshitomo Nara's reworking of historical Japanese woodcuts disturbs the floating world. Not only are the artists' visual repertoires new and surprising, but their creative methods and strategies help conquer a public that is mostly untouched by contemporary art. Published in association with the Ursula Blickle Foundation.

PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 208 pgs / 190 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 3/2/2003
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2003 p. 79   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783775712545 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00

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Misaki Kawai: Blueberry Express

Published by Nieves.

An enchanting scrapbook-esque compilation of paintings, installations and snapshots by New York-based Japanese artist Misaki Kawai, Blueberry Express reveals an energetic sensibility reveling in handmade aesthetics, the crafting of miniature worlds and play for the fun of it. Kawai's father is an architect, and her mother a puppet-maker: the art of their daughter blends their talents perfectly.

PUBLISHER
Nieves

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6.5 x 9 in. / 32 pgs / 32 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 4/30/2010
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 132   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783905714685 TRADE
List Price: $20.00 CDN $27.95

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Eikoh Hosoe: Kamaitachi

Published by Aperture.
Text by Donald Keene, Shuzo Takiguchi.

An undisputed masterwork among Japanese photobooks, Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata's Kamaitachi was originally released in 1969 as a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Hosoe, the renowned photographer, and Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, had visited a farming village in northern Japan, where Hijikata improvised a performance inspired by the legend of a weasel-like demon named Kamaitachi. As Hosoe photographed Hijikata's spontaneous interactions with the landscape and with the people they encountered, the two artists together enacted an intense investigation of tradition and an exploration, both personal and symbolic, of contemporary convulsions in Japanese society. In 2005, Aperture published a limited-edition facsimile in homage to the original, in close consultation with the artist; now, they have made this enchanting body of work available in its first ever affordable trade edition, which was painstakingly reworked by renowned graphic artist Ikko Tanaka--the designer of the original volume--shortly before his death. His reinterpretation of this classic book object, which is truly a paragon of Japanese bookmaking, includes as a special bonus four never-before-published images from the classic Kamaitachi series.
Eikoh Hosoe was born in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, in 1933. He is an integral part of the history of modern Japanese photography, and remains a driving force not only for his own work, but also for his efforts as a teacher and ambassador, fostering artistic exchange between Japan and the outside world. Hosoe lives in Tokyo and is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

PUBLISHER
Aperture

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 12.75 in. / 112 pgs / 48 tritone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/30/2009
No longer our product

DISTRIBUTION
Contact Publisher
Catalog:

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781597111218 TRADE
List Price: $60.00 CDN $70.00

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The Modern Japanese Tea Room

Published by Damiani.
By Michael Freeman.

The Modern Japanese Tea Room showcases chashitsus, traditional Japanese tea ceremony salons, as reconceived by contemporary architects and designers. The formal tea ceremony developed in the fifteenth century, and its ritual is closely defined, as is the space for it: traditionally, chashitsus include windows, an alcove (tokonoma) with flowers and painted parchment, bamboo beds (tatami), and a fireplace on the floor (ro); they do not include furniture, in part because they are spaces for meditation. More recently those traditions--as closely associated with the upper class as ""high tea"" is in England and its colonies--have been rediscovered by architects and designers as a perfect match for their contemporary work. The Modern Japanese Tea Room includes projects from renowned Japanese names including Kengo Kuma, Terunobu Fujimori, Shigeru Uchida, Arata Isozaki, Chitoshi Kihara, Yasujirou Aoki and Hisanobu Tsujimura. Their work in a wide variety of materials--paper, wood, plastic, aluminum, glass, concrete--represents the latest and most inspiring in Japanese architecture and interior design, from a tree house in Nagano to a portable space in black lacquer.
The Modern Japanese Tea Room opens with an introduction to the history of the tea ceremony, identifying its physical elements and going over to the ceremony itself, and then moves on to more than 35 projects gathered together in 250 of Michael Freeman's powerful color images. A tribute to contemporary Japanese culture and a taste of its future.

PUBLISHER
Damiani

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 9 in. / 240 pgs / 250 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 9/1/2007
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: FALL 2007 p. 22   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788889431870 TRADE
List Price: $49.95 CDN $60.00

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Keiichi Tanaami: Drawings and Collages 1967-1975

Published by Walther König, Köln.
Text by Stefano Stoll.

Keiichi Tanaami (born 1936) is one of the most influential artists of Japan’s postwar avant-garde. Among the country’s first video artists, and a member of the Japanese Neo-Dada movement, Tanaami visited New York in the late 1960s and came face to face with the paintings of Andy Warhol. Having worked as a graphic designer, Tanaami was entranced by Warhol’s amalgam of graphic and fine arts, and began to make drawings and collages that blended psychedelic kitsch with traditional Japanese arts, in a style that quickly led to album covers for the Monkees and Jefferson Airplane. This volume collects Tanaami’s erotic, surreal and cartoonish drawings and collages from these years, when the artist was most steeped in American pop culture, just before he became art director for the Japanese Playboy. The dust jacket folds out into a large black-and-white poster.

PUBLISHER
Walther König, Köln

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8.25 x 11 in. / 70 pgs / 42 color / 8 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 8/31/2012
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 104   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783863351168 FLAT40
List Price: $44.95 CDN $60.00

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Araki: Love and Death

Published by Silvana Editoriale.
Edited by Francesca Bernasconi, Fuyumi Namioka. Text by Marco Franciolli, Fuyumi Namioka, Guido Comis.

Japan's most famous photographer, and one of photography's most prolific bookmakers, Nobuyoshi Araki is notorious for his erotic photographs of women in bondage. Japanese bondage, which differs from western bondage in its orchestration of knots and binding to arouse specific points upon the body, offers visual as well as erotic rewards that Araki has scrutinized with great zeal. Araki is able to bestow eroticism upon all manner of natural imagery, but is also celebrated for series such as Sentimental Journey and Winter Journey, which record his marriage and the death of his wife. Driven by an attraction to the uncensored facts of Eros and Thanatos, Araki has always made humanity the center of his concerns; but at several junctures in his career, the authorities have evinced indifference to such motives, removing his work from sale and arresting curators for exhibiting his work. Nonetheless, the craft of Araki's photography is not in doubt, and in recent years, his work has expanded to accommodate broader aspirations, inflected by age: "When I photograph unhappiness I only capture unhappiness," he told Nan Goldin in an interview, "but when I photograph happiness, life, death and everything else comes through." With over 300 photographs, this monumental survey provides a careful selection from his most important photographic cycles, from Satchin and Sentimental Journey to Winter Journey, Cityscapes Polart, Sensual Flowers, Bondage and others, to his most recent works.

Born in Tokyo in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki worked at an advertising agency in the 1960s, where he met his future wife, Yoko Araki, the subject of his now classic volume Sentimental Journey. Her last days were recorded in a 1990 volume called Winter Journey. At the age of 70 his prolificness remains undimmed: "It is my past and the lust for life that is pushing me to take pictures now."

PUBLISHER

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 10 x 11 in. / 400 pgs / 745 color and bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 3/31/2011
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 39   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788836617371 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00

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