The most comprehensive book to date on the innovative multimedia artist Doug Aitken. Defying definitions of genre, Doug Aitken has explored every medium, from architecture and film to installations and interventions. While Aitken’s work varies in both theme and context, his installations share a common thread in their ability to use technology to evoke meaningful personal reactions from the viewer, encourage audience interaction, and inspire communal gatherings. His films often explore themes of displacement and temporality, and through his keen awareness of motion, sound, and color he creates dreamlike landscapes and the futurist aesthetic for which he has become known. This beautifully designed book features visual essays by the artist and surveys his work in all mediums. The monograph is organized thematically into the four most prevalent ideas connected with his work, inspires thought, and will leave readers examining their own relationship to the world around them.

Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry and Anne Pasternak. Text by Klaus Biesenbach, Peter Eleey, Doug Aitken.

Art is one of the tools we have to sculpt time and create experiences that are highly concentrated, or open and infinite. - Doug Aitken American artist Doug Aitken is internationally recognised for his ambitious practice that incorporates objects, installations, photographs and vast, multi-screen environments that envelop viewers within a kaleidoscope of moving imagery and sound. Aitken has realised museum projects around the world, as well as monumental interventions within the natural landscape and below the ocean's surface. This beautifully designed book encompasses the breadth of Aitken's artistic practice and is produced on the occasion of his survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Australia. Edited by chief curator Rachel Kent, it features a series of in-depth interviews that provide fascinating insights into Aitken's creative thinking and his wider engagement with the creative communities around him; and a series of image plates documenting his acclaimed museum works, landscape interventions and live happenings. Informative and visually compelling, it is sure to be a favourite among Aitken's collectors, as well as those interested in contemporary art.

To the Chinese people, jade is a precious stone endowed with magical properties which encapsulated all that mankind aspires to in terms of character, elegance, tranquility, purity and virtue. The Chinese love jade not merely because of its rarity or its luster but because of a deeper aesthetic value. Chinese Jade: The Spiritual and Cultural Significance of Jade in China presents a comprehensive view of jade and its history in China from Neolithic times to the Qing dynasty. It illustrates pieces of jade that are on display not only in the Palace Museum in Beijing but in the many provincial and other museums across China. It will help the reader to understand what jade means to the Chinese in China; how it is classified and described and where it is found and worked and displayed. It has a value beyond that of a simple catalogue and places jade in its natural, and central, cultural context.

This fully illustrated artist book, published in conjunction with Doug Aitken: song 1, includes essays by Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator and the organizing curator; Barney Hoskyns, author of such books as Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, and Weird Scenes & the Sound of Los Angeles, and Dean Kuipers, an editor at the Los Angeles Times and a longtime writer on music.

Text by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.

"I became restless with the flat surface of the screen so the work gradually evolved into the rest of the space," says Doug Aitken of his multichannel film work. Lately he has been projecting from multiple points onto a single structure. And he has turned from wide-open and lonely landscapes (Electric Earth, Diamond Sea) to wide-open and lonely people (new skin). The protagonist of the surreal "Alpha, " played by cult actor Udo Kier is both: as he travels, he dematerializes and becomes the space that he inhabits. Luckily for readers, Aitken is as bored with the square shape of the conventional book as he is with the conventional screen: this collection of "Alpha" images, accompanied by text from the artist, is bound in the shape of a head in profile.