Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting brings together some of the world’s finest examples of meiren hua (paintings of beautiful women), a largely neglected and misunderstood genre of Chinese painting spanning the country’s last imperial dynasty (1644–1912). Often dismissed as decorative or misinterpreted as highbrow portraits of ladies, these enigmatic and relatively unexamined works are the subject of close scholarly scrutiny in this publication. The corresponding exhibition includes works from the collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as well as loans from the British Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a number of other American museums and private collections in England, Sweden and France.

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting

Arts & Photography

White, Julia

Berliner, Nancy

Cahill, James

Handler, Sarah

Fongfong, Chen

History & Criticism

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Born in 1942, Paul Kos has been a highly influential artist in the Bay Area for well over three decades. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was one of the major figures on the early Conceptual art scene, notable especially for his early experimental video works and seemingly simple but technically innovative sculptural installations, which generally featured evocative audio or video components. He was one of the first to incorporate video into interactive installations. The artist's best-known work is arguably the sublime “Chartres Bleu,” a 1986 video installation that re-creates in full scale a stained-glass window from the Chartres cathedral in France. Each of the 27 vertically stacked video monitors duplicates an individual leaded glass panel. The brightness of the images stimulates the light changes in a normal day, accelerated to 12 minutes. Depending on the light, the narrative scenes are clearly readable or, when brightly illuminated, dissolved into abstractness. Everything Matters, published on the occasion of an exhibition of Kos's work at the Berkeley Art Museum, is the first major volume on his work.

Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective

Constance Lewallen

Berkeley Art Museum

Pacific Film Archive

Individual Artists

For the past decade, Byron Kim has maintained a steadfast commitment to exploring the potential for content in abstract painting. Kim's work reflects his attraction to the postwar tradition of monochromatic painting, exemplified by Ad Reinhardt's black paintings and Brice Marden's fields of color. While Kim incorporates the visual language of color and abstraction, he also addresses cultural and personal issues, positioning himself closely with many of his contemporaries, including Glenn Ligon and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Like Ligon and Gonzalez-Torres, Kim has invested the formal strategies of the 1960s, such as seriality and grids, with private and political significance; the end result resonates with elegance and emotional complexity. Threshold provides an overview of Kim's career from several vantage points: a curatorial essay by Eugenie Tsai on the concept of “threshold” in Kim's work, a conversation with Constance Lewallen, Glenn Ligon, Janine Antoni and Kim on the 1990s art world, an essay on color theory and color in Kim's work by art historian Anoka Faruqee, and a new photo and text project by Kim himself. The publication of Threshold precedes the touring of a major exhibition of Kim's work, which will open at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the fall of 2004 and travel throughout the U.S. for two years.

Byron Kim: Threshold 1990-2004

Tsai, Eugenie

Faruqee, Anoka

Consey, Kevin

Jeanne Dunning's unwavering focus over the past two decades has been the terrain of the human body, in particular the ways in which we perceive and conceive norms of gender, sexuality, and reality itself. Her images--including recent widely circulated work that showed subjects sitting in a pink, pudding-like substance that evoked liquid flesh or liquid body fat--interrogate the boundaries between inside and outside, normal and abnormal, the erotic and the abject. They have made significant contributions to contemporary visual culture. Study After Untitled presents a selective survey of the Chicago artist's photographic and video works, including among its essays one from Dunning herself, revealing her work anew in the play of intention and hindsight. As Dunning gains international recognition, Study After Untitled broadens her work's associations and clarifies its well-earned place in the canon and in contemporary art history.

Jeanne Dunning: Study After Untitled

In this study of American art, time and motion are fragmented, mechanized, slowed down and sped up so that the last century flies by. Works range from Joseph Stella's Battle of Lights, Coney Island (1915-18) to Shirley Shor's real-time projection Landslide (2004).

Measure of Time

Published on the occasion of the North American premiere of Mahjong, a landmark exhibition of contemporary Chinese art from the world-renowned collection of the Swiss businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg, this catalogue accesses recent Chinese history through the lens of its art and the keen eye of an observant collector. More than 90 artists are featured in this fully illustrated publication, including Ai Weiwei, Huang Yan, Liu Wei, Wang Du, Weng Fen, Xu Bing, Yue Min Jun, Zhang Huan and Zhang Xiaogang. Along with the exhibition's themes of urbanization, globalization and alienation, China's underground tradition and its current cultural renaissance are addressed in essays by leading Chinese art historians Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen. Film critic James Quandt elaborates these issues in an essay on internationally acclaimed film director Jia Zhangke.

Mahjong: Art, Film, and Change in China

MATRIX is published on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of this groundbreaking contemporary art exhibition series at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. Originally conceived in 1978 as a rotating program of single-artist exhibitions, it continues as a space of active engagement with contemporary art and ideas. MATRIX has presented the work of more than 240 international artists, including Doug Aitken, Michael Asher, Louise Bourgeois, James Lee Byars, Sophie Calle, Bruce Conner, Brian Eno, Eva Hesse, Robert Irwin, Zoe Leonard, Chris Marker, Julie Mehretu, Shirin Neshat, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman and Richard Tuttle. At more than 500 pages, this volume--designed collaboratively with New York's Project Projects--presents the history of UC Berkeley Art Museum's innovative program and includes newly commissioned conversations between some of the most important voices in contemporary art, including Michael Auping, Lawrence Rinder, Jens Hofmann and Jordan Kantor.

Matrix: Berkeley: A Changing Exhibition of Contemporary Art

Published on the occasion of a groundbreaking museum exhibition curated by Lawrence Rinder with Matthew Higgs, Create showcases work made at the three foremost centers for artists with developmental disabilities: Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Creativity Explored in San Francisco and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities in Richmond. These centers were founded between 1972 and 1982 by Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz, who today are recognized as pioneers of the art and disabilities movement. The husband-and-wife team created studios where disabled artists were integrated into the larger art community of the Bay Area, both influencing and being influenced by other artists. This richly illustrated catalogue offers an overview of the work being made at the centers, including works on paper, paintings and sculpture. Artists include: Mary Belknap, Jeremy Burleson, Attilio Crescenti, Daniel Green, Willie Harris, Carl Hendrickson, James Miles, Marlon Mullen, Bertha Otoya, Lance Rivers, Judith Scott and William Tyler.

Create

Combining studio, classroom, library, gallery and stage, The Possible offered a new model of museum exhibition. Rather than presenting existing artworks, artist/curator David Wilson hosted over 100 artists and collectives--with “artist” understood in the broadest sense. The BAM/PFA galleries were transformed into studios that were used by both guest artists and museum visitors. The exhibition made itself during its four-month run, as works created in the studios were exhibited in an adjacent gallery. The catalogue is conceived in a similar vein, as one of the experiments of The Possible created by guest artists Luke Fischbeck and Lauren Mackler of Public Fiction, a Los Angeles–based project space and journal. Created partially onsite, it is inspired by the exhibition’s spirit of improvisation and collaboration. It gathers essays, photographic documentation and printed artifacts generated in the exhibition itself.

The Possible

WILSON, David

Mackler, Lauren

Rinder, Lawrence

Fischbeck, Luke

Published in conjunction with BAMPFA's inaugural exhibition in its new building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, "Architecture of Life" explores the ways that architecture-as concept, metaphor and practice-illuminates various aspects of life experience. It comprises over 275 works of art, scientific illustrations and architectural drawings and models, and includes work by Wilson Bentley, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Marcel Duchamp, Suzan Frecon, Buckminster Fuller, Johannes Itten, Tomás Saraceno, Viktor Schauberger, Lebbeus Woods and Iannis Xenakis, as well as Mbuti drawings, Pomo baskets, Micronesian navigational charts, Tibetan mandalas and tantric drawings from Rajasthan.

Architecture of Life

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

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Books by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive