Focusing on the themes of abject politics, transcending media, performativity, and satire and simulation, 'Parergon' presents the work of over twenty-five visual artists including Kodai Nakahara, Tatsuo Miyajima, Kazumi Nakamura, Yukie Ishikawa, Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Yukinori Yanagi in an array of media spanning painting, sculpture, duration performance, noise, video and photography.00The title makes reference to the gallery in Tokyo (Gallery Parergon, 1981-1987) that introduced many artists associated with the New Wave phenomenon, its name attributed to Jacques Derrida?s essay from 1978 which questioned the?framework? of art, influential to artists and critics during the period. Parergon brings together some of the most enigmatic works that were first generated during a rich two-decade period that are pivotal to the way we perceive and understand contemporary Japanese art today. In the aftermath of the conceptual reconsideration of the object and relationality spearheaded by Mono-ha in the 1970s, this era opened up new critical engagements with language and medium where artists explored expansions in installation, performance, and experimental multi-genre practices.00The book follows the exhibition at Blum & Poe which ran in two parts from February to May 2019 in Los Angeles.

Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha is the most comprehensive study in English to date on the postwar Japanese movement Mono-ha (School of Things), and examines the group's practice in Tokyo between 1968-1972 at the height of the nation's political upheaval against the US-Japan Security Treaty, anti-Vietnam War protests and its oil crisis. The Mono-ha artists--who included Noburu Sekine, Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga and Koji Enokura--all distinguished themselves through an aesthetic detachment that, instead of "creating" things, strove instead to "rearrange" them into artworks that interacted with the spaces around them. While sharing certain traits with the Land Art and Minimalism movements that were taking place in the United States, and the Arte Povera movement in Italy, Mono-ha was ultimately a rejection of the Euro-American avant-garde and is now synonymous with the beginnings of contemporary art in Japan.

Edited by Michael Darling. Text by Graham Bader, Michael Darling, Elizabeth Mangini, Mika Yoshitake.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nov. 18, 2012-Feb. 25, 2013.