Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha

First Edition, 2012. 200 pages.

Book measures 8.5 x 10.25 inches. Hardcover with thick boards and die cut circle to front cover, with mirror cut-out circle affixed to back cover. Published on occasion of the exhibition at Blum & Poe in 2013. Corners to boards show light bumping. Very faint signs of age-toning to boards. Binding is solid. A Very Good copy.

“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.”