The visionary paintings of Martin Wong, one of the unsung geniuses of New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s, are collected here and examined in depth for the first time. Entirely self-taught, Wong created intricate compositions that combine gritty social documents, cosmic witticisms, and highly charged symbolic languages-customised manual alphabets for the deaf, street graffiti, Nuyorican poetry, hand-lettered signs, meticulously rendered brick facades, rearrangements of Zodiac signs-sometimes within a single painting.

The urban landscape of Loisaida, the Hispanic section of the Lower East Side where Wong lived, is the source of his imagery. Whatever the theme-the survival of a neighbourhood besieged by drugs and crime, homoerotic fantasies of men in uniform, the multiplicity of meaning in language, the kitsch and ornamentation of Chinatown USA-Wong’s work is visually startling and movingly autobiographical.

More information on Martin Wong can be found here.

Produced on the occasion of On Kawara’s exhibition at Dallas Museum of Art, 18 May–24 August, 2008.

Since the mid-1960s, On Kawara (b. 1933) has objectively recorded his existence through everyday numbers, words, and found images. This book presents works selected by the artist from throughout his illustrious career, including paintings made at the time of the 1969 moon landings, other large-scale paintings, a 100 Years Calendar, and a vast array of his own books that chronicle his extensive travels, acquaintances, and personal readings.

Paul Thek in Process: Commentaries on/of an Exhibition includes all research material which was made public in different formats in the exhibition series Paul Thek in Process. The exhibition was born out of the desire to memorialise Paul Thek’s spatial work that the artist realised in Europe in the 1970s and to make it possible to experience it in a larger historic context. Thanks to the historic distance, the latter is possible today. As exhibition, documentation and inscenation at the same time, the project not only traced the tracks of a lost artistic practice, but also questioned the importance of ephemeral material in exhibition contexts, the boundaries of the artwork, the exhibition and institution history, the reception and today’s practice of re-inscenation. The publication is conceived as a work list, a biography and a history of objects, an image documentation of the exhibitions and, last but not least, as a self-critical curatorial review on this past project.

Produced on the occasion of Japan’s Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, 26 March–25 August, 2013.

Throughout his career Hiroshi Hamaya pursued objective documentation, while Kansuke Yamamoto favoured avant-garde forms of expression. These photographers embody two sides of modern Japanese life: the traditional and the forward looking, the rural and the urban, the Eastern and the Western.

Both artists grew up during the brief Taishō era (1912–1926), a period of industrialization and experimentation that ushered in the modern Shōwa era (1926–1989). It was during this time, between the international Depression and World War II, that Hamaya began to document regional traditions and social issues, primarily on the country’s rugged “back coast” along the Sea of Japan. In contrast, Yamamoto found inspiration in Surrealist art from Europe and produced innovative, socially conscious photographs, poems, and other works that advanced the avant-garde movement in Japan.

Produced on the occasion of the awarding of the ABN AMRO Art Prize to Evelyn Taocheng Wang and the subsequent exhibition Het bloemblaadje, dat tijdens het ochtendkrieken was gevallen, paktte ik op in de avondschemering, which has a purposefully included typo and is a quote she translated from a book by Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) about his childhood home, a source of memories to him.

For the exhibition Wang made eight new paintings and a series of drawings and paintings on rice paper, including one drawing of more than seven meters long. Central are the customs and practices in Dutch culture, symbolized by Wang, among other things, by oliebollen.

Designed by Irma Boom.

Produced on the occasion of The Art of Connecting: Atsuko Tanaka at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, which illustrated an unprecedented balance between all aspects of Tanaka’s practice, ranging from her earliest gestures, including documentation of Gutai performances in the 1950s, to paintings made shortly before her death in 2005.

Through variety it conveys a remarkable consistency of vision, connecting art and everyday life as we know it. It articulates an artistic proposition that makes Tanaka one of the most important figures of the Japanese post-war avant-garde.