This book describes the emergence of the Buddhist landscapes of Myanmar. The authoritative text is framed by the artefacts, sites and ecology of Upper and Lower Myanmar, with coverage of the Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze-iron chiefdoms that preceded Hindu-Buddhist walled polities of the first millennium AD. Views and descriptions of sites, many not published in English before, include Letpanchibaw, Htaukmagon, Moegyobyin, Badigon, Tagaung, Halin, Sriksetra, Thaton and Dawei. The author’s extensive fieldwork with Myanmar academics over the last decade brings an original perspective on the catalysts that structure landscape interaction, enabling expansion of agriculture, resource utilisation and international trade networks. While the book’s primary focus is the archaeology of Myanmar, this is linked to Yunnan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Asia. The central theme, however, remains the relationship between man and the environment; flexibility was the norm as seasons changed, rivers meandered and seasonal lakes formed, creating the shallow flooded terrain conducive to the early development of wet-rice cultivation, bronze-iron technology and brickwalled sites. Social changes later accelerated with the rise of the state but the author concludes that the most profound transformations were already in place in the first millennium AD landscape of Upper and Lower Myanmar. Profusely illustrated with site plans, site views, maps and artefacts, this book is aimed at encouraging research into the many new areas thrown up by its ground-breaking text.

100 years ago Siam declared war on Germany. In the early morning hours of 22 July 1917, army units and gendarmerie called the roughly 200 completely unsuspecting German and Austro-Hungarian men in Bangkok out of their beds, presented them with the declaration of war and went on to arrest them. At the same time, marine units boarded the nine ocean going German ships anchored on the river, capturing what was considered by all to be the greatest prize. With these events began Siam’s 17 months at war with two European powers.

The story of how these 17 months unfolded in Siam and in Europe is at the heart of this book. It is a complex tale interweaving political, diplomatic, military, cultural and social history. The book introduces adventurous and scared Thai soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front, arrogant European politicians and diplomats convinced of their racial and cultural superiority, shrewd Thai officials beating the West at its own game of imperialism, princes rivalling over influence and power, German businessmen imprisoned by “Orientals”, Thai students caught up in world events and submarine attacks, and the King of Siam himself.

Siam’s participation in World War I was the single most important international event for contemporaries in the kingdom, its symbolism unmatched by any other occurrence of the times. The book is the first-ever extensively researched study of Siam and World War I in all its facets. By combining primary sources from Thailand, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Austria, the study describes local events in a global context and explains how world events manifested themselves in the royal palaces and on the streets of Bangkok. The legacy of the events a century ago is remarkably tangible even today, and the book connects the reader with this legacy.

The book is easily accessible to the non-specialist reader interested in history and political affairs, as it describes numerous colourful episodes and vignettes, and includes over 300 rare photographs and illustrations, reproduced in high-quality print.

In the final months of 1979, a city was born in dry forestland along the border of Cambodia and Thailand. It was a city of refugees. The Khmer Rouge had been recently overthrown, and Cambodians fortunate enough to be alive were free to pick up and go where they wanted. Many chose to make for a frontier settlement that became known as Camp 007. The camp was located close to Sadok Kok Thom Temple, which became a focus of worship for the refugees. The temple contained one of the most important inscriptions in Khmer History, written by a high ranking Brahmin and detailing important political and religious events that took place in the Empire. The author discusses the history of the inscription, from its creation to the modern day as well as how modern and ancient history have merged around the temple over the past forty years.

“While reporting on Cambodians fleeing war and revolution in 1979, John Burgess came across an ancient Khmer temple hidden in the bush…30 years later he returned to that temple to decipher its history. The result is this lovely book that tells the story of the temple and the larger Angkor Empire levened with Burgess’ own odyssey to recover that history.” Elizabeth Becker, author of When the War was Over

Perched atop a five-hundred-meter cliff in the far north of Cambodia, Preah Vihear ranks among the world’s holiest sites. It was built a millennium ago as a shrine to Hindu god Shiva by the same civilization that gave the world Angkor Wat. Sadly, it has been transformed recently into a battlefield prize, first with Cambodian factions during the Cambodian civil war, and later (to present) it has been the focus of sometimes violent border disputes with Thailand. In Temple in the Clouds former Washington Post foreign correspondent John Burgess and author of two previous books on Cambodia, draws on extensive research in Cambodia, Thailand, France and the United States to recount the cliff top monument’s full history, ancient and modern. He reveals previously unknown legal strategies and diplomatic manoeuvring behind a contentious World Court case of 1959-62 that awarded the temple to Cambodia. Written in a lively, accessible style, Temple in the Clouds brings new insight to one of Southeast Asia’s greatest temples and most intractable border conflicts. With 50 photographs, plans and maps.

Also by John Burgess: Stories in Stone: ISBN: 9786167339016; A Woman of Angkor ISBN: 9786167339252

Thread and Fire is a fascinating journey through the centuries-old trade networks that developed across a group of archipelagos along the equator. Of the 18,000 islands, more than 900 are permanently settled by over 360 ethnic groups, speaking 700 languages and dialects. For centuries this vast and rich environment favoured local and regional exchanges, and it was only later that people visited from afar. New connections integrated these archipelagos with the distant civilisations of continental Asia: first India, later China and from the 13th century onwards, the Islamic world. Finally, with the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century, global trade and connections grew rapidly. Spices and forest & sea products were the focus of foreign interests, and textiles were the currency for their acquisition. These imported textiles, complemented with ornaments and jewellery, soon became part of the region’s social fabric, indispensable items of gift and exchange, essential markers for the indictment of ceremonies, rights of passage and signifiers of rank and prestige.

Thread and Fire explores and illustrates those ancient connections and traditions through Indonesian and Timorese textiles, regalia and jewellery from the Francisco Capelo collection, assembled over a 20-year period and now part of the permanent collection of Casa Asia-Colecao Francisco Capelo in Lisbon.

With an eclectic practice embracing urban planning, public sculpture and industrial design, Ian Ritchie CBE RA is one of Britains most visionary architects. Published here for the first time, his poems, aphorisms and etchings witness a profound engagement with the built environment. Ritchie writes poetry in order to better understand a project, using words to investigate the particularities or challenges of a site, and the process of composition to bring ideas into focus. His calligraphic etchings imagine the shape or spirit of commissions in simple but powerful strokes. Variably pragmatic and philosophical, often witty, his aphorisms on work and life from the importance of light to the nature and possibility of progress reveal a modernists belief in the potential of architecture to improve society. These are lines of thought, committed to paper before any designing begins. They demonstrate that, for Ritchie, being an architect is many more things besides. Ian Ritchie CBE RA is an internationally acclaimed architect. His built designs include the Leipzig Glass Hall, the Spire of Dublin, the elevator shafts for the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, winner of the RIBA National Award in 2007.

Swiss painter Robert Zünd (1827-1909), also known in Switzerland as ‘Master of the Beech Leaf’, is revered for his light-flooded paintings of bucolic landscapes. Swiss photographer Tobias Madörin, born 1965, has gained international recognition for his tableau-like images that document the interaction between the inhabitants and their surrounding environment. This new book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern in summer 2017, features work by both artists. Rather than merely enjoying the beauty of the sun-lit paradise Zünd depicts in his precise manner, the book invites us to look more closely. For this purpose, Zünd’s paintings are juxtaposed with Madörin’s photographs of the same views, captured today with an analogue large format camera. Thanks to the slowness of the procedure and the wealth of detail achieved in working with such an apparatus, Madörin’s photographs boast an intensity comparable to that of Zünd’s paintings in terms of precision of the gaze. Observation, the gaze, and the aptitude to see is the real topic of this exhibition and accompanying book. Bellevue: Robert Zünd (1827 1909) – Tobias Madörin (*1965), Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1 July to 17 October 2017. Text in English and German.

Since 1997, artist Claude Sandoz has been sharing his time between his native Switzerland and the Caribbean island of St Lucia. Each time he returns from the Antilles, he brings back chests of sketches and drawings produced during his stay. The island topic provides an assortative focal point for his exuberant work. Sandoz is no longer a tourist, he has ‘gone native’ at his second home and developed a much more complex relationship with St Lucia than a mere seasonal artist’s residence would allow.

This moment in Sandoz’s art that ethnologists describe as going native is the focus of this new monograph: when own and alien match, overlay with and possibly enrich each other. The book features a vast selection of Sandoz’s works, complemented by topical essays and a conversation with the artists. Interspersed poems by Caribbean writers round out the book.

Text in English and German.

In 2006, the book Historic Houses in the Engadin: Architectural Interventions by Hans-Jörg Ruch brought the name and work of this Swiss architect to international attention. His new book, with equally opulent design and again lavishly illustrated, now documents the entire range of his achievements over nearly twenty-five years. His oeuvre comprises private houses and multi-unit residential buildings, public buildings such as museums or libraries, as well as infrastructure designs. A focus of the firm’s work is the rebuilding and restoration of existing and in particular of historic buildings. Close-up – Ruch & Partner Architects 1994-2016 features all of the firm’s realised buildings and projects to date, including the restored historic houses in the Engadine with the careful and sensitive contemporary interventions that made his name internationally known. Each is presented with atmospheric photographs and selected plans that demonstrate the firm’s approach and concepts and with a concise text. A topical essay on Ruch’s architecture in context with his biography and the surrounding Swiss mountain landscape.

Lee Mullican (1919-98) was best known for his inimitable West Coast-inspired explorations in abstraction, infused with mysticism and the transcendent. First exhibited as part of the pivotal exhibition of the Dynaton Group, which Mullican co-founded with fellow artists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen, his works are today widely collected and held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others. The first book in more than a decade to focus on this important figure in twentieth-century American art, Cosmic Theatre: The Art of Lee Mullican surveys a key theme running through the artist’s career, framing his unusual hybridisation of symbolic figuration, abstracted landscapes, and abstract space with his long-time fascination with the sky and the galaxy beyond. The book explores the development of the Mullican’s work in the context of his time and his biography, looking also at the implications of Jungian philosophy in relation to his admiration of pre-Columbian and Native American cultures. Michael Auping’s essay is complemented by fifty full-colour illustrations, featuring major rare paintings and drawings by Mullican from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures. Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the spectacle we observe above us day and night. Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia has expanded the focus of his work on the sky, with the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from earth. In his most recent work Light Fall, Baselgia makes traceable the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and shows astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Taken in Norway, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the Swiss Alps, the images visualise the geometry of astrodynamics and celestial mechanics. His photography also capture the phenomenon of umbra, planet earth’s shadow thrown into space. The new book Guido Baselgia – Light Fall features 80 stunning tritone plates. Complemented with essays by German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss photography critic Nadine Olonetzky, they offer a window into the light phenomena that leave us awestruck today as much as they did our ancestors. Text in English and German.

Hubert Looser, entrepreneur and patron of the arts, has put together an outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art. The focus of Looser’s interest is Abstract Expressionism, Minimal Art, and Arte Povera. The collection also includes classical modernists, as well as Asian and African sculpture. The Hubert Looser collection will be given to Kunsthaus Zürich as a long-term loan in 2017. This book is published to coincide with the first exhibition of key works from this highly significant Swiss collection at Kunsthaus Zürich in summer 2013. It features paintings and sculptures by artists such as John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Elsworth Kelly; Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Sean Scully, Louis Soutter, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and others. It also offers an insight into Looser’s private space, his home and garden, as a setting for masterpieces of 20th and 21st-century art. Text in English and German.

Built in 1913 for a local politician and engineer and beautifully situated on the shore of Lake Zurich, this handsome villa today is home to the Jacobs Foundation and the Johann Jacobs Museum. It was acquired in the 1980s by the Jacobs family, who had been in the coffee, tea, and cocoa trade in Bremen since 1895 but eventually sold the business to an international conglomerate in the 1990s. The Johann Jacobs Museum focuses on the history and present of global trade routes. Its exhibitions and educational program revolves around cultural hybrids that develop sometimes intentionally, sometimes incidentally along the main routes and byways of trade.

This new book tells the story of the Jacobs House and offers an introduction to the goals of the Jacobs Foundation and the museum. It also documents the building’s extensive reconstruction by Basel-based architects Miller & Maranta, who have made major changes to its structure with equal measures of radicalism and sensitivity while entirely preserving its character and style.

Text in English and German.

Light Scripture collects three photo essays by Swiss photographer Andreas Greber. Created over the course of two decades, Greber’s photographs show simple scenes, such as fragments of a wall, translucent portraits, and wooded landscapes. Yet they are enigmatic and unsettling in that, while visible, their subjects escape the determination of shadow and light. For Greber, this is the essence of photography: inscribing with light. Presented in a dual English-German edition, Light Scripture brings together thirty-three of Greber’s photographs in a beautiful, large-format book. It takes readers through the artist’s process in the creation of the series, which explores the aesthetics and properties of photography with a special focus on how recent shifts in photography during the digital age call for a re-evaluation of its classic analogue variety. Greber’s photographs are complemented by an essay by art critic Konrad Tobler.

Text in English and German.

Markus Raetz is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in Switzerland. Initially educated and working as a primary school teacher, he became an artist in his early twenties. Since the 1970s, his work, including solo exhibitions, has been on the international stage. Raetz works with a variety of materials and media. The phenomenon of perception is his main focus, rather than how something is represented. Prints form a major part of his work. Markus Raetz.The Prints 1951-2013 covers his complete body of work in this genre.; the Catalogue Raisonné is complemented by a separate volume, with essays on his work and artistic development. Exhibitions: Museum of Fine Arts Bern, early 2014 (date TBC). Markus Raetz is represented with works also in the permanent collections of museums such as: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Main); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla CA; Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Musée national d art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Münchenstein near Basel; Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Text in English, German and French.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is adored worldwide as a revolutionary painter and loved for his collages, or papiers découpés, the icons of his late work. His paintings and drawings for a long time overshadowed his achievements as a sculptor. Yet his Back Series, four bas-reliefs showing a nude, created between 1908 and 1930, are widely recognised as a milestone in modern sculpture. Starting out from the naturalistic depiction, Matisse gradually transformed it to reach a radically abstracted figure. Each of the four original plaster casts represents a decisive moment of this artistic process. This transformative process has parallels in Matisse’s painting and drawing. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich marking the artist’s 150th anniversary, this is the first book to explore the relation between metamorphosis and feedback in both main fields of the artist’s work. Documents of his diverse sources of inspiration for his sculptures – photographs of nudes, examples from African and ancient art – as well as images featuring Matisse at work as sculptor, round out this volume. It is a welcome addition to any art library, highlighting the lesser known side of this modern master. Published to coincide with the exhibitions ‘Matisse – Metamorphoses’ at the Kunsthaus, Zürich between 30 August and 8 December 2019, and ‘Musée Matisse’, in Nice between 15 February and 15 May 2020.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is adored worldwide as a revolutionary painter and loved for his collages, or papiers découpés, the icons of his late work. His paintings and drawings for a long time overshadowed his achievements as a sculptor. Yet his Back Series, four bas-reliefs showing a nude, created between 1908 and 1930, are widely recognised as a milestone in modern sculpture. Starting out from the naturalistic depiction, Matisse gradually transformed it to reach a radically abstracted figure. Each of the four original plaster casts represents a decisive moment of this artistic process. This transformative process has parallels in Matisse’s painting and drawing. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich marking the artist’s 150th anniversary, this is the first book to explore the relation between metamorphosis and feedback in both main fields of the artist’s work. Documents of his diverse sources of inspiration for his sculptures – photographs of nudes, examples from African and ancient art – as well as images featuring Matisse at work as sculptor, round out this volume. It is a welcome addition to any art library, highlighting the llesser known side of this modern master. Text in French. Published to coincide with the exhibitions: Matisse-Metamorphoses at the Kunsthaus Zürich between 30 August and 8 December 2019, and ‘Musée Matisse’ in Nice between 15 February and 15 May 2020.

Swiss artist, architect, designer, typographer, and theorist Max Bill (1908-94) was one of the most important exponents of concrete and constructive art and a key figure in the history of 20th-century European applied arts and design. Educated by such eminent teachers as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Bill immediately displayed a genius for work in fields as diverse as painting, sculpture, architecture, typography and design from the outset of his career in the 1930s. In the 1950s, he teamed up with Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher to found the legendary Ulm College of Design in Ulm, of which he became the first director. In his work, Max Bill carried on the Bauhaus legacy, both as an artist and a teacher, and made a decisive and lasting contribution to 20th-century cultural life.

The new edition of this authoritative and much sought-after monograph displays Bill’s wide-ranging work and sets him in the context of his cultural milieu by featuring works by his contemporaries, such as Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, and Donald Judd. Accompanying essays investigate Bill’s influence on other artists and the lasting importance of his oeuvre in the present.

Text in English and German.

Minoru Onoda was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to a Japanese family in 1937. Before the outbreak of World War II, they moved to Himeji in Japan, which remained the artist’s residence until his passing in 2008. Following his artistic education at the Osaka Institute of Fine Arts and at Osaka School of Art in the 1960s, Onoda joined the Gutai, Japan’s first post-war radical artistic movement. Gutai challenged what the movement considered a reactionary understanding to initiate new notions of art, and redefined the relationships among body, matter, time, and space. Enchanted by concepts of repetition, Onoda produced panels with amalgamations of gradually increasing dots with relief, creating organically growing shapes, progressing to infinite circles and ultimately moving to a monochrome style in painting. When Gutai disbanded in 1972, he opted for a conceptual style in which the proliferating dots disappeared. The Western world has received Minoru Onoda’s art almost exclusively in the Gutai context, for example in the 2013 exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. This overdue first-ever monograph on Minoru Onoda introduces him as an artist in his own right. Apart from investigating his relations with Gutai, it explores his creative process with a particular focus on his sketchbooks.

Minoru Onoda was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to a Japanese family in 1937. Before the outbreak of World War II, they moved to Himeji in Japan, which remained the artist’s residence until his passing in 2008. Following his artistic education at the Osaka Institute of Fine Arts and at Osaka School of Art in the 1960s, Onoda joined the Gutai, Japan’s first post-war radical artistic movement. Gutai challenged what the movement considered a reactionary understanding to initiate new notions of art, and redefined the relationships among body, matter, time, and space. Enchanted by concepts of repetition, Onoda produced panels with amalgamations of gradually increasing dots with relief, creating organically growing shapes, progressing to infinite circles and ultimately moving to a monochrome style in painting. When Gutai disbanded in 1972, he opted for a conceptual style in which the proliferating dots disappeared. The Western world has received Minoru Onoda’s art almost exclusively in the Gutai context, for example in the 2013 exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. This overdue first-ever monograph on Minoru Onoda introduces him as an artist in his own right. Apart from investigating his relations with Gutai, it explores his creative process with a particular focus on his sketchbooks.

Text in Japanese.

The work of Austrian-born, Swiss-based artist Othmar Eder is marked by a multitude of materials, media, and formats. However, the passage of time and his personal experiences travelling from place to place are key inspirations behind his creative process. Across his paintings and drawings, motifs related to these themes recur with minor or major variations. Eder also works frequently in photography and video, where his focus is on subtle shifts in structure and texture. Featuring 250 illustrations, Othmar Eder – Finding Images provides a stunning overview of Eder’s work, while a preface by Zsuzsanna Gahse and an essay by art historian and curator Katja Baumhoff offer fascinating insights into their conception and creation. The book will bring the work of this important contemporary artist to a wider audience. Text in English and German.

Oliver Schwarz is a well-known architect in his native Switzerland. Less widely known is his skill as an artist and the inventor of a series of incredible flying contraptions. Here to bring Schwarz’s body of artistic work to a wider audience is Schwarzflug, the first book to focus on his paintings, drawings and inventions over three decades. Schwarzflug features some four hundred full-colour illustrations to demonstrate the impressive range of Schwarz’s work, which comprises both analogue – chalk, ink, and pencil – and digital techniques with equal accomplishment. In an interview published alongside the illustrations, Schwarz offers insight into his creative process. He elaborates on the relationship between his art and the flying contraptions he has invented, on his sense of space while painting, and on the manipulable nature of digitally produced art. Additional texts offer short descriptions of the images and explore associations with Western artistic traditions.

Text in English and German.

For two decades, Swiss photographer Serge Fruehauf has documented fascinating architectural details cast in concrete. But his focus lies not only in the beauty of the built environment, but also in the surprising and sometimes absurd puzzles created by later interventions: stairways that lead to dead ends, disfigured garden walls that have long outlived their purpose. With Serge Fruehauf – Extra Normal, Joerg Bader has selected the best and most interesting of more than one thousand images in Fruehauf’s most recent series. Taken throughout Paris, Geneva, Grenoble, and Lyon, Fruehauf’s photographs form a critical reflection on architectural modernity mitigated by the photographer’s love of the spaces he has photographed, and his deep sympathy for the architects and planners who were drawn to concrete as a versatile and multifaceted building material in the latter part of the twentieth century. Despite its promise, the buildings or clusters of buildings that have come out of the modern methods of construction with concrete appear today as bland monstrosities or grotesque hybrids of traditional and modern architecture. Fruehauf’s photographs are joined by a preface by scholar and curator Martino Stierli, which offers an insightful discussion of how Fruehauf’s work highlights these structures as allegories of the current cultural situation. Text by English, French and German.