John Yau

John Yau engages visual art, social theory, and syntactical dexterity to push the limits of language toward an expansive counter-poetics

Further Adventures in Monochrome

Thirteen stories on people of mixed Asian and Caucasian origin. In the title story a man of Chinese-Dutch origin, who feels a foreigner wherever he goes, discovers the pleasure of feeling at home when on a visit to Hawaii people take him for a local resident. By the author of Crossing Canal Street.

Hawaiian Cowboys

Chinese-American writer John Yau's short fiction collection is set in bleak neighborhoods of casual misunderstanding, habitual deception and oblique, transient encounters among strangers. At the heart of Yau's artistic inquiry is that precarious and unstable thing "identity"--and the ways that isolation and alienation threaten identity altogether. The Review of Contemporary Fiction said, "These are stories that recount the symptoms of many, if not most of us."

My Symptoms

New & Selected Work, 1974-1988

Radiant Silhouette

Corpse and Mirror

In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Childrenof William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who are, like the nineteenth century poet, dissenters from consensus--Wallace Berman, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Jay DeFeo, Hilma af Klint, Katherine Bradford, Barbara Takenaga, Forrest Bess, Emmet Gowin, Sophia Al-Maria, and Simon Gouverneur, to name but a few. Yau locates and defines a shared sensibility among his subjects whose work is often set at an oblique angle to the larger culture. He probes the reasons for this stance and its aesthetic consequences and, most provocatively, inspects the how and why behind the impulse to deflect their importance. For instance, he asserts that Jay DeFeo's masterwork, The Rose, "calls many assumptions into question and challenges canonical thinking about what constitutes a major achievement in postwar art." This questioning marks each essay in the collection, a volume that sets out to reorder, if not outright dismantle, the exclusionary hierarchies that have dominated cultural discourse for decades. Blake's "wild children" are alive and well, and in Yau's nimble, intelligent prose their dissonance is exactingly parsed and joyously celebrated.

The Wild Children of William Blake

A diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events. At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, Jon Yau's poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau's poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.

Genghis Chan on Drums

In this collection of surreal, dreamlike prose vignettes John Yau explores the territory first laid out in his Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow, 1996). Yau's startling journey takes us across wastes of "cities fluttering with lost ghosts" and asks the question "what are you doing now that you're here?"

My Heart is that Eternal, Rose Tattoo

Thirty-six artists, including Roger Brown, Sue Coe, Llyn Foulkes, Leon Golub, Maxwell Hendler, Mike Kelley, Daniel J. Martinez, Joe Zucker, Paul McCarthy, Yoko Ono, Joel Sternfeld, and Andy Warhol, explore the theme of murder in this catalogue for an exhibition organized by critic John Yau. The exhibition was held at Bergamot Station in the winter of 1995. Also, text by John Yau.

Murder

Roy Sieber

Ernie Wolfe

Ernie Wolfe III

Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana

Extreme Canvas

ERICH. YAU FRANZ (JOHN.)

Federle's permutational Alpha to Omega of the letter H In Basics on Composition, Swiss painter Helmut Federle (born 1944) takes the letter H as a generative matrix. Using the basic form of three lines and two squares, Federle explores a variety of styles and expressions.

Basics on Composition

Helmut Federle

Anthony Sorce

Stanley I. Grand

Sordoni Art Gallery

Anthony Sorce, Four Decades

John G. Hanhardt

Joann Moser

This retrospective, which features 88 works from the 1960s to the present, is the first full-scale look at Wiley's long career and explores important themes and ideas expressed in his work.

William T. Wiley in Retrospect

What's it All Mean

Joe Overstreet

1975-1982

Joe Overstreet Selected Works

Avis Berman

Karen Wilkin

Jennifer Samet

The first major survey on the graceful and colorful paintings of American artist Paul Resika. This new monograph is the most comprehensive book on the work of Paul Resika (b. 1928) to date, highlighting his landscapes, portraits, and still lifes from the 1940s to the present. Resika's most important teacher was Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied on Cape Cod and in New York City in the mid-forties. Resika's subjects are drawn from nature and reflect his surroundings, which change with the seasons: in winter, he lives in New York; in summer, Cape Cod; in spring he spends time painting in the south of France and in Italy. Province-town piers, fishing boats in the harbor, figures on the beach, and French farmhouses in the countryside emanate a dreamlike serenity and make up the rich visual vocabulary for which Resika is best known. Produced in a large format with more than 220 color illustrations, this book reflects over eight decades of Resika's output, with scholarly essays that reveal his ongoing dialogue with Hofmann's sophisticated ideas about color and pictorial structure.

Eight Decades of Painting

Paul Resika

Jay DeFeo

In this new monograph on DeFeo, John Yau looks at the breadth of the artist's work and her broad range of interests and influences, while the book focuses on her late work, paintings of the 1980s as well as the exceptional corpus of drawings of the 1980s and her photographic oeuvre of the 1970s. It thus complements the book published on the occasion of her Whitney Museum retrospective in 2013.Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was part of a vibrant community of avant-garde artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle included Wallace Berman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Edward Kienholz, and Michael McClure.Although best known for her monumental painting The Rose (1958-1966), DeFeo worked in a wide range of media and produced an astoundingly diverse and compelling body of work over four decades. DeFeo's unconventional approach to materials and her intensive, physical method make her a unique figure in postwar American art.English and German text.

Chiaroscuro

Jock Reynolds

Martha Lewis

Helen Kauder

Yotam Hadar

Catalogue for Artspace's Exhibition, Connecticut (un) Bound, with essays and texts by John Yau, Jock Reynolds, exhibition curator Martha Lewis, and Artspace Executive Director Helen Kauder. Featuring work by Regan Avery, Marion Belanger, David Borawski, Richard Rose, Alison Safford, Rita Valley, Maria Lara Whelpley, Jo Yarrington/Samuel Dole/Morgan Post and 25 artists from the Allan Chasanoff Book Work Collection at Yale University Art Gallery. Design by Yotam Hadar.

Connecticut (un) Bound

In this reading of Jasper Johns's work, John Yau focuses his attention on how the artist's pioneering paintings relate to life as it is lived - and on what they tell us about what it means to be mortal and alive in time. Along the way, Yau clears a much-needed path through the tangle of narrowly self-reflexive interpretations that have plagued so much critical writing on Johns's work during the past half century - providing a fresh approach and opening our eyes to Johns's accomplishment in revealing ways. This book is written with both precision and passion. It should be read by everyone who cares about modern painting.

The Art of Jasper Johns

A Thing Among Things

Acclaimed poet and art critic John Yau, author of fourteen books of poetry, teams up with esteemed painter Thomas Nozkowski to create the exquisite Ing Grish, the second in the Saturnalia Books Poet/Artist collaboration series

Poems

Ing Grish

A beautifully produced book cataloging some of the remarkable American Outsider Art in the collection of Janice and Mickey Cartin.

John Yau

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