Alexandra Munroe

This book, 'YES Yoko Ono' accompanies an exhibition at the Japan Society Gallery in New York (October 18, 2000, through January 14, 2001) that travelled to numerous venues in North America and Asia, beginning with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. --Cathy Curtis.

YES Yoko Ono is a rigorous analysis--by experts in modern Japanese and contemporary Western art, performance, video, and music--of the innovative approaches that made Ono a seminal avant-garde figure in the Fluxus movement of the show more 1960s and continued to influence her work during the next three decades.

Ono was born in 1933 in Japan to a wealthy and pedigreed family. In her early work, the pan-artistic classical Japanese approach to culture mingles with her Zen-like search for moments of concentrated sensory experience and the anti-heroic stance of the young American artists she would meet in New York upon her arrival (with her first husband, a composer) in 1956. Also significant was her sense of herself as an outsider. She spent her early childhood in the U.S. with her family, only to be snubbed by Japanese schoolmates on her return.

In Secret Piece, from 1953, Ono wrote a musical score consisting of nothing but two half-notes in the bass line and a scribbled notation: "With the accompaniment of birds singing at dawn." It became one of the brilliantly inventive instructions for making art pieces in her 1964 book, Grapefruit, an early conceptual work. Since those heady days, she has continued to explore the possibilities, stumbling sometimes (the inert bronze sculptures of the '80s) but never abandoning her fascination with elemental feeling and observation. show less

The catalog of a current U.S. exhibition of postwar, avant-garde Japanese art (at the Guggenheim in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Art), this volume is a significant publication about a tradition that has received scant attention in this country until now.

Beginning with the Gutai movement, the exhibition chronicles art in every medium from paintings and prints to video, performance art, and installations. Substantive essays by curator Alexandra Munroe, video artist Nam June Paik, show more and others provide historical background and address the critical question of the relationship of this art to both traditional Japanese and contemporary Western aesthetics. An important acquisition for academic and large public libraries with contemporary art collections.

Exhibition dates:
Yokohama: February 5 - March 30, 1994

Guggenheim Museum SOHO, New York: September 14 - January 8, 1995

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art / Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens: May 31 - August 27, 1995 show less

(Excerpt from Preface and Acknowledgement) Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World presents a history of contemporary art from China and the rise of global art discourse spanning the watershed years 1989 and 2008. No nation in modern history underwent such a total transformation as did China during these two decades, and few shifts have had global impacts of this magnitude. The artist in this exhibition see themselves as both agents and skeptics of this accelerated change, and the show more views they offer should expand our understanding of the world we live in. Seeking tot frame a global narrative around China, Theatre of the World articulates a vision of art and the contemporary in which China is an interdependent player. With a focus on artists working on modes of conceptual art, our project sees their astute provocations in light of wider conversations about transnational modernity, postmodernism, difference and identity politics, globalization, and art and politics. Taken together, the Guggenheim exhibition, catalogue, documentary film series, online content, and educational programs look at a bold contemporary art movement that reveals as much about globalized China at the turn of the millennium as it does about the critical role Chinese artists have played in the rise of the global art phenomenon. show less

This is the first book ever published in English on the development, identity, and expression of Japanses avant-garde art after 1945, as seen within the dramatic social and political context of postwar and contemporary culture in Japan. The Japanese avant-garde art presented here is characterized by a ruling passion for spiritual freedom and individual self-expression, informed by the international trends of modernist art, yet insistent on its own original, cultural identity. The nature and show more content of that identity is a central theme running throughout this book. Profusely illustrated with historic documentary photographs and works of art, this book traces the spectacular growth and evolution of such internationally-renowned groups as the Experimental Workshop, Gutai, Hi Red Center, and Mono-ha, through the work of over 100 artists in painting, sculpture, photography, performance, video, film, and installation art.

(Abstract from the dustjacket) show less