To be specific, it's not really 'my' book. I only translated it. But it's coming out over at Amazon.com so check it out here. It officially launches on 1 June 2007, but if you pre-order now, you get a 34% Discount.
I've received my copy and true to all things printed in Japan, it's a gorgeous book.The Amazon Editorial Book Review says:
Book DescriptionNo mention of me, the translator, but hey, what do you expect? :)
Recently the West has been inundated by a steady flow of images from manga, anime, and the video games that are a key part of today's Japanese visual culture. At the same time, Japanese contemporary artists are gaining a higher profile overseas: many Westerners are already familiar with
Takashi Murakami's brightly colored, cartoonlike characters, or with Junko Mizuno's "grotes-cute" Lolita-style girls. Perhaps less familiar are the absurd fighting machines of Kenji Yanobe, the many disguises of Tomoko Sawada, or the bizarre fairytale landscapes of Tomoko Konoike. Warriors of Art
features the work of forty of the latest and most relevant contemporary Japanese artists, from painters and sculptors, to photographers and performance artists, with lavish full-color spreads of their key works. Author Yumi Yamaguchi offers an insightful introduction to the main themes of each
artist, and builds up a fascinating portrait of the society that has given birth to them: a Japan that still bears the scars of atomic destruction, a Japan with a penchant for the cute and the childish, a Japan whose manga and anime industries have come to dominate the world.
Warriors of Art takes its title from a phrase used to describe Taro Okamoto (1911-1996), perhaps the first truly influential contemporary artist to emerge in postwar Japan, who fought to bring modern art to a wider audience. Following in Okamoto's footsteps, the forty artists featured in this
book are a new generation of warriors, attacking our senses with a shocking mix of the cute, the grotesque, the sexy, and the violent, forcing us to sit up and take notice of their vision of Japan.
About the Author
Yumi Yamaguchi is a Tokyo-based art critic who writes on art for a wide variety of Japanese magazines, and is the author of several books on the subject. This is the first time she has been published in English.
If you're even remotely interested in art, this book is worth it's weight in US Dollars!
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