Reaktion Books: 753 books
Outsider Art
From the Margins to the Marketplace
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2010
The term outsider art has been used to describe work produced exterior to the mainstream of modern art by certain self-taught visionaries, spiritualists, eccentrics, recluses, psychiatric patients, criminals, and others beyond the perceived margins of society. Yet the idea of such a raw, untaught...
by Stephen M. Hart
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2014
From El Megano and Black God, White Devil to City of God and Babel, Latin American films have a rich history. In this concise but comprehensive account, Stephen M. Hart traces Latin American cinema from its origins in 1896 to the present day, along the way providing original views of major films and...
Global Undergrounds
Exploring Cities Within
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2016
Rest your eyes long enough on the skylines of Delhi, Guangzhou, Jakarta—even Chicago or London—and you will see the same remarkable transformation, building after building going up with the breakneck speed of twenty-first-century urbanization. But there is something else just as transformative...
by Wu Hung
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2015
We might think the Egyptians were the masters of building tombs, but no other civilization has devoted more time and resources to underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium B.C.E. to the early twentieth century, the Chinese have been...
The Double Screen
Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting
Language: English
Release Date: November 22, 1996
This book contemplates a large problem: what is a traditional Chinese painting? Wu Hung answers this question through a comprehensive analysis of the screen, a major format and a popular pictorial motif in traditional China. With a broad array of examples ranging from the early centuries C.E. to...
A Story of Ruins
Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2013
This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. The story of ruins in China is different from but connected to “ruin culture” in the West. This book explores indigenous...
Screen of Kings
Royal Art and Power in Ming China
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2013
Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy – relatives of the emperors – in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). Through an analysis of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through a study...
Defining Features
Scientific and Medical Portraits, 1660-2000
Language: English
Release Date: December 24, 2012
Portraiture as a genre is receiving increased attention at the same time that public curiosity about science is reaching unprecedented levels. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 14 April – 17 September 2000, and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual...
Contemporary Chinese Art
A Critical History
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2014
Since the confirmation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of Opening and Reform in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has undergone a liberalization of culture that has led to the production of numerous forms of avant-garde, experimental, and museum-based art. With a fast-growing international market...
China into Film
Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2000
Since 1984, Chinese cinema has been the most dramatic entry onto the international film scene. China into Film is the first book to look at contemporary Chinese cinema as a visual art and to illustrate the ways in which it has been shaped by centuries of Chinese tradition. Jerome Silbergeld looks...
Refrigerator
The Story of Cool in the Kitchen
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2017
From a late-night snack to a cold beer, there’s nothing that whets the appetite quite like the suctioning sound of a refrigerator being opened. In the early 1930s fewer than ten percent of US households had a mechanical refrigerator, but today they are nearly universal, the primary means by which...
Offal
A Global History
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2013
“Offal” has the same pronunciation as “awful”—an appropriate homophone, given that offal comprises the whole spectrum of an animal’s glands, essential organs, skin, muscle, guts, and every unmentionable in between. Yet as Nina Edwards shows in this intriguing history, offal has been consumed...
Darkness
A Cultural History
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2018
Darkness divides and enlivens opinion. Some are afraid of the dark, or at least prefer to avoid it, and there are many who dislike what it appears to stand for. Others are drawn to this strange domain, delighting in its uncertainties, lured by all the associations of folklore and legend, by the call...
by Michael Charlesworth
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2011
Derek Jarman (1942–94) is known as one of Europe’s greatest independent film-makers; his films call into question and reconsider the nature of filmmaking itself. But, as Michael Charlesworth shows in this new biography, Jarman was also a painter, writer, gardener, set designer, and an influential...