"Akasegawa is the kind of artist who inspires everybody every time he makes a new piece of art." -Yoko OnoIn the 1970s, estranged from the institutions and practices of high art, avant-garde artist and award-winning novelist Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) launched an open-ended, participatory project to search the streets of Japan for strange objects which he and his collaborators labeled "hyperart," codifying them with an elaborate system of humorous nomenclature.Along with "modernologists" such as the Japanese urban anthropologist Kon Wajiro and his European contemporary, Walter Benjamin, Akasegawa is part of a lineage of modern wanderers of the cityscape. His work, which has captured the imagination of Japan, reads like a comic forerunner of the somber mixed-media writings of W.G. Sebald, and will appeal to all fans of modern literature, art, artistic/social movements and writing that combines visual images and text in the exploration of urban life.In this revised edition, Matthew Fargo's original US translation of Akasegawa's hilarious, brilliantly conceived exercise in collective observation is accompanied by reflections from noted scholars Jordan Sand and Reiko Tomii, as well as a new essay by Akasegawa scholar William Marotti and a reflection on Akasegawa's legacy as a teacher by writer, artist and composer Masayuki Qusumi, a former student of Akasegawa's.
The much anticipated reprint of Yamanaka's "giddy, bawdy, and genuinely moving" (Kirkus Reviews) novel about a young girl's fierce love for her family on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'iIn the wake of their mother's death, the three Ogata children grow up fast. As their Poppy withdraws into a grief-stricken stupor, eldest daughter Ivah is left taking care of her siblings: Maisie, her timid sister who hasn't said a word since their loss; and Blu, her reckless brother whose childhood romance risks exposing him to new dangers. All that's holding the Ogatas together is 12-year-old Ivah's single-minded determination, but she must ultimately decide whether the future she wants for herself is on Moloka'i or beyond its shores. Through the rich, multivocal pidgin of Hawai'i, Lois-Ann Yamanaka offers an unvarnished look at a life where music, poverty and love share the same home. Originally published in 1997 and now back in print, Blu's Hanging shines with humor and expressiveness even as it shows the brutal toll of an adolescence haunted by loss. This new edition includes an interview with Yamanaka about her career and the controversies surrounding this novel, along with a contextualizing afterword by Asian American scholar Erin Khuê Ninh.Born in Hawai'i and raised in Moloka'i, Honolulu-based author Lois-Ann Yamanaka (born 1961) has won a Lannan Literary Award, an Asian American Literary Award and an American Book Award.
Until his death in 2012 at age 100, legendary filmmaker Kaneto Shindo was a living link to more than 70 years of Japanese cinema history. Screenwriter of more than 200 films and director of more than 40, Shindo earned international praise for his masterpieces Children of Hiroshima and The Naked Island, and for the fantastical proto-horror film, Onibaba. In this volume, Shindo narrates his career, from his beginnings as an art director and fledgling screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, to his collaborations with such luminaries as Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa and Kinji Fukasaku, to his breakout into independent filmmaking in the 1950s and beyond. This first-ever English language book on Shindo's work is a stunning introduction to one of film's great overlooked masters. It includes the full screenplay of The Naked Island and a foreword by Benicio del Toro.
A coming-of-age tale of dislocation and inherited trauma from the acclaimed young French Vietnamese novelistFrench Vietnamese writer Line Papin's stunning English-language debut, The Girl Before Her offers a window onto the existential anguish of displacement as experienced by a child on the cusp of becoming a woman. Uprooted without explanation from the sunshine and chaos of Hà N?i at the age of ten, the narrator finds herself adrift in the unfamiliar, gray world of France and grappling with a deep sense of uncertainty about who she is and where she belongs. Lacking the words to express her growing sense of alienation, she stops talking, then eating. She is hospitalized and almost dies from anorexia. Part meditation, part family history, part message in a bottle to her younger selves, Papin's lyrical work of autofiction explores what it takes to embrace one's multiracial, transnational self by making peace with the generations of women who've come before. The Girl Before Her is the first book to be published by Ink & Blood, a new joint imprint from Kaya Press and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN), which aims to bring Vietnamese literary voices from across the globe to English readers.
An experimental memoir from an acclaimed Bay Area social-practice artist and activistIn this innovative rethinking of the artist monograph, Oakland-based artist, educator and activist Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik (born 1981) captures conversations with the people who shaped her creative practices and helped her map the tools that are most important to her: wonder, intuition, criticality and belonging. Bhaumik's work has been celebrated by the San Francisco Chronicle and other media for using art as a strategy to connect memory and history with the urgent social issues of our time, as in her 2016 installation Estamos Contra El Muro / We Are Against the Wall, in which she collaborated with artists, makers and community members to recreate (and then smash) the US/Mexico border wall out of brick-shaped piñatas. We Make Constellations of the Stars interrogates not only what makes an artist an artist, but how connection is crucial for personal and political transformation as an artist of color.Visionary and historian Jeff Chang (author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation) writes: "Thoughtful, engaged and bold, Sita Bhaumik stares down trauma, cruelty and injustice, but always leads us towards wonder, joy and hope. By drawing connections and making meaning of seemingly unrelated points of light, she reveals new pathways toward belonging and freedom for all. She is one of the most insightful and inspiring artists of our time."
Introducing English readers to the speculative fiction of pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings and interventions into internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea's most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities.Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djuna's stories together form a brilliantly intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was.Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna, who first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s, has steadfastly refused to confirm any personal details regarding age, gender or legal name, or even whether they are one person or multiple. Djuna is widely considered one of the most prolific and important writers in South Korean science fiction. They have published nine short story collections, three novels, and numerous essays and uncollected stories.
First published in 1941 and long unavailable, this work tells the true story of Korean revolutionary Kim San (Jang Jirak), who left colonized Korea as a teenager to fight against Japanese imperialism and fought alongside Mao's Red Army during the Chinese Revolution. This remarkable memoir brings to vivid life some of the most dramatic events of the period.
The debut English-language collection of one of South Koreas most distinctive and accomplished sci-fi authors
Gravestones hatch political critiques and tomatoes resist being eaten in the wildly surreal and funny stories of Genpei Akasagawa, a giant of the Japanese avant-gardeThere is a small but potent club of authorsâ¿Miranda July and Patti Smith are both membersâ¿who were renowned artists long before they became writers. Genpei Akasagawa was already a giant of the Japanese contemporary art world when he began writing these stories, which earned him Japanâ¿s two most prestigious book awards. In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism. After reading I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, you will never be able to look at a sliding door, a rubber band or a plastic gutter the same way again. In spite of their suburban settings, the stories here are more radical than the most cosmopolitan contemporary art. Or as the protagonist puts it: âThe whole art thing is a little played out at this point. Nowadays, itâ¿s all about buying gutters. Going out to buy a gutter on a sunny day.â?Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) was a rare phenomenon, an artist who successfully transitioned from the avant-garde to the larger realm of popular culture. Akasegawa emerged on the Japanese art scene around 1960, starting in the radical Anti-Art movement and becoming a member of the seminal artist collectives Neo Dada and Hi Red Center. The epic piece Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident (1963-74), which involved a real-life police investigation and trial, cemented his place as an inspired conceptualist. Hyperart: Thomasson (Kaya Press, 2010), a collection of musings on art that the city itself makes, marks a crucial turning point in his metamorphosis from subculture to pop-culture status. Also an accomplished author writing under the penname Katsuhiko Otsuji, in 1981 he won Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, for his story âDad's Gone,â? translated into English here for the first time in this volume.
The film Kiku and Isamu (1959) was one of the first cinematic depictions of mixed-race children in postwar Japan, telling the story of two protagonists facing abandonment by two different Black GI fathers and ostracism from Japanese society. Bringing together studies of the representations of the Hapa Japanese experience in culture, Hapa Japan: Identities & Representations (Volume 2) tackles everything from Japanese and American films like Kiku and Isamu to hybrid graphic novels featuring mixed-race characters. From Muslim Japanese-Pakistani children in a Tokyo public school to "Blasian" youth at the AmerAsian School close to a US military base in Okinawa, the Hapa experience is multiple, and its cultural representations accordingly are equally diverse. This anthology is the first publication to attempt to map this wide range of Hapa representations in film, art and society.
Capturing the 1990s independent film scene and art world through a collection of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa along with photographs and other artifacts from his archiveIf Films Could Smell is at once an assemblage of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa (born 1962) from his nearly 30 years as a filmmaker and artist, and a time capsule of the independent film scene and art world of the 1990s as told through artifacts, diary entries, letters, emails, photographs, script notes and assorted bric-a-brac from Bogawa's archives. As with many of Bogawa's films, it's a collage that doesn't try to hide its seams, a jumble of ideas both realized and unrealized, an exploded diagram and a manifesto. The title conveys his interests in personal and cultural memory, and how these intersect with one's identity. Bogawa's work has been variously described as "experimental," "Asian American" and "independent cinema." This volume lays out these labels and dissects them, sometimes humorously. Straddling genres, If Films Could Smell is a document of possibility and provocation.
Glimmering with candor and dead-on humor, this memoir tells the story of the meteoric rise of Japanese American filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (born 1965), from 1980s teenage delinquent in Honolulu to Ivy League slumster to take-no-prisoners movie auteur with a serious attitude problem.
Coming from a country renowned for its hi-tech industry and ultraspeed broadband yet mired in the unfinished Cold War, South Korean science fiction offers us fresh perspectives on global technoindustrial modernity and its human consequences. The book also features a critical introduction, an essay on SF fandom in South Korea, and contextualizing information and annotations for each story.
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