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(Left) CHEWING GUM AND CHOCOLATE: SHOMEI TOMATSU, Published by Aperture. Edited by Leo Rubinfien and John Junkerman. (Right) SULAIMAN, Published by Kerber Verlag. Edited by Melanie Pocock.
Chewing Gum and Chocolate: Shomei Tomatsu
Beginning in the late 1950s, Shomei Tomatsu, one of Japan’s foremost photographers, embarked on a decades-long investigation of United States military bases in Japan, documenting the impact of the US military’s presence on the defeated nation. Originally entitled “Occupation,” the series was later renamed the more neutral “Chewing Gum and Chocolate.” Beautifully stark images of the American GIs—on duty, about town or out in the red-light districts—grace the pages of the book, which brings the series together into a single volume for the first time. Tomatsu’s ambivalence toward the good, the bad and the ugly of the US occupation is revealed in American photographer and commentator Leo Rubinfien’s thorough essay, while an omnibus selection of writings by Tomatsu from the 1960s and ’70s provides sociopolitical context behind the series.
Sulaiman
On the cover of Shooshie Sulaiman’s first monograph, we see her stuffing a large piece of inari in her mouth, as she eats with a member of a museum’s cleaning staff. This action was part of her 2008 performance Emotional Baggage at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in which she used a suitcase of her own notebooks as a starting point for conversations with strangers. The rich selection of color illustrations and texts
by curators including Russell Storer, Trevor Smith and Hammad Nasar—which each spotlight a facet of her practice—gives insight into how Sulaiman has married personal and national histories with deep intimacy. Interspersed between the professional conversations are personal revelations from Sulaiman’s longtime friends who collectively attest to the many ways her creative expression has influenced their lives.
(Left) RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: CASEBOOK, Published by Art Gallery of York University. Edited by Michael Maranda. (Right) BETWEEN STATE AND MARKET, Published by Brill. By Jane Devevoise.
Raqs Media Collective: Casebook
With varying meanings in Arabic, Persian and Urdu—one is “the motion of a whirling dervish”—Raqs is a fitting moniker for the Delhi-based multidisciplinary ensemble who have made their name resisting definitions for more than 20 years. Casebook documents 80 artworks and projects from 2000 to 2012, accompanied by Raqs’s own descriptions and their cryptic philosophical musings on everything from etymology to political theory. Published in tandem with—but surpassing—their 2011 exhibition “Surjection,” at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, this jam-packed paperback includes thoughtful texts by a throng of contributors. Among them, Alexander Keefe’s essay on Raqs’s lesser-known work as founders of a community media lab and an educational think tank in Delhi’s slums sheds light on the “quiet heart” of this provocative cooperative. Though far from definitive, this scrappy, 295-pager packs in many an insight.
Between State and Market
The trajectory of Chinese contemporary art from underground dissidence, in 1979, to establishment acceptance by 1993 is traced with admirable clarity and detail by Jane Debevoise in Between State and Market. A longtime student of Chinese art and the board chairperson of Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong, Debevoise has transformed her doctoral thesis into a finely documented study of 15 tumultuous years in recent Chinese history. Debevoise draws on 50-plus interviews conducted with artists, curators, scholars and dealers, and on the AAA archive itself for printed matter neglected in other studies of the subject—particularly the covers of period art magazines and newspapers—that convey the flavor of the times in unconventional ways. Although eschewing academic language, the book’s scholarly apparatus—footnotes and two superb bibliographies—provide genuine authority backstage.