Monday, June 20, 2011

Read: Liu Kang's Essays on Art & Culture

Image source: http://www.selectbooks.com.sg/getTitle.aspx?SBNum=051545

Title: Liu Kang: Eassays on Art and Culture
By: Siew, Sara (Ed.)
ISBN: 9789810876753
Published in 2011. (1st edition)
Publisher: The National Art Gallery, Singapore.

This book is an interesting compilation of essays by Liu Kang. I had purchased a copy of the English version when I was at a forum titled Liu Kang: Tropical Vanguard held on 2 April 2011.

The original essays were written by Liu Kang in Mandarin. For the ease of reading, I had decided to get myself an English translation of the compiled essays. There are pros and cons to it. The advantage was that I could read it with relatively greater ease. The disadvantage was that at some points, it was in fact much better to read the original Chinese text. Now that I have read the English version of the book, I will be happy to exchange my English version of this book for the Chinese version, at least for a read.

Liu Kang was one of the pioneer Singapore artists whom I had studied during my years as an art student. This book gave me a deeper understanding to Liu Kang's philosophy towards life and his approach to art. In this book, he also shared his ideas about the growth of art in Singapore, of music and dance. I thought it was a great idea to list the essays in chronological order for this made better sense to me. This is a book to read for anyone who wishes to better understanding Liu King's approach to art and life.

Details on ways to purchase this book can be found here: http://nationalartgallery.sg/educational-resources/publications/

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