Books by John Yau

The remarkable plein air paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b.1963), which chronicle everyday lives within our diverse modern world, are the focus of this first monograph of his career to date. Immersing himself in communities around the globe, Xiaodong seeks to present people who often sit on the fringes of society who find themselves marginalised within a contemporary world striving for homogenisation. At first glance a traditional realist painter, closer examination reveals an artist exploring a range of media while interrogating the opportunities presented by modern technology. The result is an outstanding body of work, often monumental in scale, that examines, reconsiders, and extends observational painting in fresh directions, while bringing into question the lines between fact and fiction, the traditional and the contemporary, to create a wholly original vision.

This volume highlights the work of American artist Leon Polk Smith (1906-96), one of the founders of the hard-edge style of minimalist art, who rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s with his distinctive shaped canvas series. While his minimalist peers were shifting away from modernism, Smith was wholeheartedly advancing the formal and rational elements of the modernist tradition, in particular the legacy of Mondrian. Published for a 2017 exhibition at Lisson Gallery, this book focuses on paintings and drawings from the artist's seminal Constellation series from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The publication features an essay by the poet and writer John Yau, alongside color reproductions of each of the works included in the exhibition. An illustrated chronology details the artist's life and work, including previously unpublished archival material.