April 30 - May 24, 2003

Installed in France since the forty' s of the last century, Zao Wou-Ki has joined, like no other artist, the knowledge of Chinese painting and calligraphy with the individualist and subjective experience of the western abstract art. Impressed by Paul Klee' s paintings and impeled by Henry Michaux and Andre Malraux, two of the most active French intellectuals of the second post war, Zao Wou-Ki has kept deepening in his particular introspective journey for over five decades. All his work seems to restore an immense inner landscape, no exempt of dissonances and shadows. This book collects, for the first time, the clues of his creative approach through his writings and interviews and a significant selection of his works from his early works to date. 130 illustrations

The year before he died, in what was one of the most difficult yet prolific periods of his life, Paul Klee created some of his most surprising and innovative works. In 1939, the year before his death from a long illness and against a backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil and the outbreak of World War II, Klee worked with a vigor and inventiveness that rivaled even the most productive periods of his youth. This book illuminates the artist’s response to his personal difficulties and the era’s broader realities through imagery that is tirelessly inventive—by turns political, solemn, playful, humorous, and poetic. The works featured testify to Klee’s restless drive to experiment with form and material. His use of adhesive, grease, oil, chalk, and watercolor, among other media, resulted in surfaces that are not only visually striking, but also highly tactile and original. Not unlike a diary, the drawings are often meditative reflections on the pains and pleasures of life—their titles, among them Monsters in readiness and Struggles with himself, signal Klee’s frame of mind. Renowned art historian Dawn Ades looks at this group of paintings and drawings in the context of their time and as indicative of a pivotal moment in art history. Moved by this late period of Klee’s oeuvre, American artist Richard Tuttle responds to specific works in the form of dialogical poems. This stunning publication highlights the novelty and ingenuity of Klee’s late works, which deeply affected the generation of artists—including Anni Albers, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, and Zao Wou-Ki—that emerged after World War II and continues to captivate artists and viewers alike today

One of the most important sculptors of this century, Richard Serra has been a spokesman on the nature and status of art in our day. Best known for site-specific works in steel, Serra has much to say about the relation of sculpture to place, whether urban, natural, or architectural, and about the nature of art itself, whether political, decorative, or personal. In interviews with writers including Douglas and Davis Sylvester, he discusses specific installations and offers insights into his approach to the problem each presents. Interviews by Peter Eisenman and Alan Colquhoun elicit Serra's thoughts on the relation of architecture to contemporary sculpture, a primary component in his own work. From essays like "Extended Notes from Sight Point Road" to Serra's extended commentary on the Tilted Arc fiasco, the pieces in this volume comprise a document of one artist's engagement with the practical, philosophical, and political problems of art.

A 20-year project, this is the most comprehensive and significant photography book on China, covering every aspect of Chinese life, from traditional customs to the shock of modernity.

Prepared in cooperation with the artist’s estate, Zao Wou-Ki: 1935–2010 features more than three hundred works and is the most complete monograph available on the artist. Born in Beijing, raised in Shanghai, Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) rose to prominence in his adopted France, and was one of the world’s most celebrated artists at the time of his death. Trained in both Western and Chinese painting, Zao’s work bridged both. He became a master when he transcended both vocabularies. “I wanted to paint differently,” Zao Wou-Ki wrote about leaving China in 1948, and shortly after he landed in Paris, his work took on Western influences: a nude and a portrait of his wife, both 1949, recall Matisse in their subjects, loose style, and use of pattern. In 1951, Zao saw Paul Klee and began creating city scenes and landscapes with a similarly inky, slightly fantastical hand. The Western artists, he said, led him back to China, a statement evidenced in the ideograms and Shang dynasty motifs in his 1956 Ste`le pour un ami (Stela for a friend). As Zao moved beyond the West for inspiration, he gradually moved beyond China, too. In doing so, he found his own style. His first abstract painting, Vent (Wind), from 1954, features invented signs and evokes the movement of air without directly representing it. His work continued to evolve, with his experimentation with india ink; his exploration of enormous, multi-panel paintings; his use of bright colors that recall J.M.W. Turner or Franz Kline. His creative maturity lasted for more than half a century, expressed in pictures that marry the lyricism of classical Chinese painting and the expressive force of European modernism, and yet are entirely individual. Prepared in cooperation with the artist’s estate, Zao Wou-Ki: 1935–2010 features more than three hundred works and is the most complete monograph available on the artist. It highlights his great abstract oil paintings, while also giving due attention to the other facets of his oeuvre, including his student work, his first Matisse- and Klee-influenced canvases, his lithographs and travel notebooks, and his work in watercolors and brush painting. In addition to a penetrating essay by prominent statesman, intellectual, and friend of the artist Dominique de Villepin, the book includes detailed notes on key works, a selective bibliography, a critical anthology, and an illustrated chronology of Zao’s life.