Doryun Chong – författare

The definitive monograph on Lee Bul, one of Asia's most prominent contemporary artists. Born in South Korea in 1964, Lee Bul is one of the most important contemporary artists of her generation — a daring visionary who resolutely questions the world around her through extraordinary, otherworldly acts of imagination. Across multiple decades and a wide range of media, including performance art, sculpture, installation and painting, she has been at the forefront of contemporary artistic practice, exploring such topics as the body, gender, failed utopias, and our increasingly technologized existence. Lee Bul: Life and Work is an unparalleled survey of the artist’s career to date, from her fearless performance pieces of the late 1980s to her visually arresting 2024 commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Highly illustrated throughout, and with contributions from art historians, curators, and critics, Lee Bul is a fascinating and in-depth exploration of a vital, groundbreaking artist.

The new M+ museum of modern and contemporary visual culture will open its permanent new home in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong in the autumn of 2021. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the building is set to become a striking landmark on the waterfront of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. But even before the new building opened, M+ has been busy engaging with local and international audiences through a broad range of programmes and exhibitions and a strategic approach to collecting. The opening of M+’s new home is undoubtedly a milestone in the institution’s ongoing story, yet it also marks an important moment to reflect on its development to date. The Making of M+ is an immersive visual encounter with the many stages of the museum’s evolution. H. G. Masters, the book’s guest editor, and Sulki & Min, its award-winning designers, present images and words relating to M+’s first three decades – starting with the reclamation of the land on which the M+ building stands. While the hundreds of images in the book document the programmes, collections, staff, audiences and architecture that have helped shape the museum, the texts have been carefully selected from key moments in the institution’s formation, encompassing official pronouncements, staff mantras, public reactions, and snippets from the local and international press. Offering a wide range of perspectives and voices, The Making of M+ is an innovative companion to the creation of a remarkable cultural institution – the first of its kind in Hong Kong and Asia.With 360 illustrations in colour

A richly illustrated companion to selected works from the collections at M+. At the heart of Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture are the M+ Collections – the result of a carefully considered programme of collection-building that began with the inception of M+ in 2011. The first of their kind in Asia, the collections comprise four different holdings: the M+ Collection, made up of 6,000-plus works and objects from the worlds of visual art, moving image, and design and architecture, the museum’s core areas of interest; the M+ Sigg Collection, consisting of 1,510 works of contemporary Chinese art; the M+ Collection Archives, composed of over 45,000 items; and the M+ Library Special Collection, with 400-plus items. Together, the holdings serve to embody the bold and ambitious mission with which M+ was founded: to become a multidisciplinary museum of contemporary visual culture, rooted in Hong Kong and Asia but with an international outlook. M+ Collections: Highlights presents the work of more than 300 artists, designers, film-makers, photographers and architects specially selected to represent the collections as a whole, from Zhang Peili and Charlotte Perriand to Nam June Paik, Zaha Hadid, and Shigeru Ban. Organized into seven chapters, each encompassing a different decade of the collections’ span – from the 1950s to the 2010s – the book consists of individual entries on the featured makers composed of one or more of their works and an insightful analysis by an M+ curator. Interspersed among these entries are 24 thematic essays intended to illuminate some of the movements, tendencies and ideas around which the collections have grown, including modernism in Asian art and the future of painting in a digital world. Full of unexpected connections and new perspectives, M+ Collections: Highlights represents not only an invaluable introduction to M+’s unrivalled storehouse of visual culture but also an indispensable work of reference.

A major career survey of Yayoi Kusama, one of the most widely admired and popular artists of our time, published in collaboration with M+, Hong Kong, to accompany M+’s first Special Exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now. Yayoi Kusama is that rare thing: an artist who has achieved truly global acclaim. In a wide-ranging career spanning seven decades and multiple media, she has established profound connections with audiences around the world. Emerging at the forefront of artistic experimentation in Asia in the mid-20th century, Kusama soon became a central figure in the New York art scene of the 1960s. Today, Kusama continues to communicate her highly personal and spiritual world view through her art. Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is the most comprehensive survey of her work to date. Structured around six thematic sections, ‘Infinity’, ‘Accumulation’, ‘The Biocosmic’, ‘Radical Connectivity’, ‘Death’ and ‘Force of Life’, the volume elucidates the aesthetic and philosophical concerns at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre. In addition to a selection of Kusama’s writings, some of which have never been published before, the book features correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, an interview with critic and curator Yoshie Yoshida, and a roundtable discussion among leading authorities in the field. Also included are curatorial essays exploring different aspects of Kusama’s practice, and a detailed visual chronology of her life. Appealing not only to those already familiar with Kusama and her work, but also to anyone discovering it for the first time, this monograph reveals an artist who, while shaped by international artistic currents, remains deeply connected to the traditions and culture of her native Japan.

Published to accompany a major exhibition at M+, Hong Kong, this catalogue places more than sixty Picasso masterpieces alongside works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists selected from the M+ collections. Why is Pablo Picasso so famous the world over? How does Picasso, the quintessential modern artist of the 20th century but also undeniably a European, relate to the work of contemporary artists in other parts of the world, such as Asia? And what do Picasso and his legacy mean in an age and a place that are far from his own? These are some of the fundamental questions explored by this book, which accompanies a major exhibition at M+, Hong Kong, and the Musée National Picasso-Paris. At its heart are two intertwined narratives. First, Picasso’s life and artistic practice are interpreted through the four archetypes of the creative genius, the outsider looking in, the consummate magician and the endlessly inquisitive student of art history. Secondly, the fresh interpretation of Picasso’s oeuvre is placed ‘in conversation’ with the works of Asian artists, thereby revealing what Picasso’s art can tell us about artistic practice today, and vice versa. A visual timeline shows how Asian art and artists migrated to Europe during Picasso’s lifetime and became an unavoidable part of his cultural context and milieu while also describing Picasso’s reception in Asia from the 1910s up to the end of the 20th century. A bold exploration of complex relationships between origin and reception, invention and adaptation, and West and East, this book enriches the discourse on transnational contemporary Asian art and visual culture, while contributing to the growing critical literature on global art history.

Tracing the correspondence and careers of four artists blazing a path for Korean modern art across the globePublished with Tina Kim Gallery.From the birth of Korean Informal to the emergence of Dansaekhwa, this book is the first comprehensive survey of modern Korean abstraction through the lives of four protagonists: Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929-2021), Kim Whanki (1913-74), Lee Ufan (born 1936) and Park Seo-Bo (1931-2023). These four artists strove for "international contemporaneity" in four different cities: Seoul, Tokyo, Paris and New York. This landmark volume foregrounds the personal correspondences between these pioneering artists as critical documents charting the development of modern Korean art. Newly translated, previously unpublished letters are reproduced here alongside groundbreaking artworks, offering an unprecedented window into the artistic, philosophical and logistical challenges of forging a distinctly Korean modernism.