The most comprehensive book to date on the innovative multimedia artist Doug Aitken. Defying definitions of genre, Doug Aitken has explored every medium, from architecture and film to installations and interventions. While Aitken’s work varies in both theme and context, his installations share a common thread in their ability to use technology to evoke meaningful personal reactions from the viewer, encourage audience interaction, and inspire communal gatherings. His films often explore themes of displacement and temporality, and through his keen awareness of motion, sound, and color he creates dreamlike landscapes and the futurist aesthetic for which he has become known. This beautifully designed book features visual essays by the artist and surveys his work in all mediums. The monograph is organized thematically into the four most prevalent ideas connected with his work, inspires thought, and will leave readers examining their own relationship to the world around them.

To the Chinese people, jade is a precious stone endowed with magical properties which encapsulated all that mankind aspires to in terms of character, elegance, tranquility, purity and virtue. The Chinese love jade not merely because of its rarity or its luster but because of a deeper aesthetic value. Chinese Jade: The Spiritual and Cultural Significance of Jade in China presents a comprehensive view of jade and its history in China from Neolithic times to the Qing dynasty. It illustrates pieces of jade that are on display not only in the Palace Museum in Beijing but in the many provincial and other museums across China. It will help the reader to understand what jade means to the Chinese in China; how it is classified and described and where it is found and worked and displayed. It has a value beyond that of a simple catalogue and places jade in its natural, and central, cultural context.

Dedicated to the three iterations of the Mirage installation in Palm Springs, Detroit, and Gstaad (2017?2021), this publication offers the reader an experiential book that shares some of the characteristics of Mirage: the immersive emotion, the disrupted perception, the merging of the viewer and the landscape. This unique publication is thus not only about Mirage; it is conceived as an immersion in the artwork?s atmosphere.00A site-specific installation successively exhibited in the California desert outside Palm Springs, a defunct Detroit bank, and the Alpine landscape of Gstaad, Mirage is inspired by the ranch-style suburban American house?informed by the ideas of architect Frank Lloyd Wright?and entirely composed of reflective mirrored surfaces. A visual echo-chamber, its mirrored surfaces form a life-size kaleidoscope that absorbs and reflects the landscape. Subject and object, interior and exterior, the tangible and the ephemeral, the psychological and the physical, built architecture and landscape : each of these oppositional forces are held in constant tension, yet allowed to shift and transform during the passing of time and seasons. Like a human-sized lens, Mirage works to frame and distort the evolving world outside of it. There is no single time to view this work, as each moment provides a new variation new: at night the distant lights refract to create a universe of stars; on a tranquil afternoon the sky is transformed into banks of blue fragmented by slices of clouds. There is no fixed perspective or correct interpretation. Each experience of this living artwork is unique. ?I?m interested in the viewer seeing themselves in the work,? Aitken says about his installation, which also dialogues with the history of the Land art.00Co-published with Zolo Press.

Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry and Anne Pasternak. Text by Klaus Biesenbach, Peter Eleey, Doug Aitken.

This new monograph on artist Doug Aitken presents a survey of his latest works as well as highlights from his decades-long career. American artist Doug Aitken is internationally recognized for his ambitious practice that incorporates objects, installations, photographs, and vast, multi-screen environments that envelop viewers within a kaleidoscope of moving imagery and sound. Based in Los Angeles, Aitken has realized museum projects around the world, as well as monumental interventions within the natural landscape and below the ocean’s surface. This beautifully designed book encompasses the breadth of Aitken’s artistic practice and is produced on the occasion of his survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Australia. Edited by chief curator Rachel Kent, it features a series of in-depth interviews that provide fascinating insights into Aitken’s creative thinking and his wider engagement with the creative communities around him; and a series of image plates documenting his acclaimed museum works, landscape interventions, and live happenings. Informative and visually compelling, it is sure to be a favorite among Aitken’s collectors, as well as those interested in contemporary art.

Text by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.

This fully illustrated artist book, published in conjunction with Doug Aitken: song 1, includes essays by Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator and the organizing curator; Barney Hoskyns, author of such books as Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, and Weird Scenes & the Sound of Los Angeles, and Dean Kuipers, an editor at the Los Angeles Times and a longtime writer on music.