A Talk by John Yau

FREE ADMISSION
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
7 PM

Related Exhibition Information
Light, Time and Motion: The Paintings of Tibor Freund

Please join The Painting Center Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at 7 PM for “Who is Tibor Freund?”, a Talk by John Yau.  A retrospective monograph of Tibor Freund’s work, authored by art critic, poet and essayist, John Yau, will be published by Hard Press Editions in 2008. �This event is free and open to the public.

John Yau
critic, poet, essayist

John Yau, a leading art critic, poet, essayist, and prose writer, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1950, shortly after his parents left Shanghai, China. In 1972, at the age of twenty-two, Yau graduated from Bard College with a bachelor’s degree. Six years later, he received his M.F.A. degree from Brooklyn College.

John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, as well as contributed essays to many catalogues and monographs. Collections of poetry include Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow, 1996); Berlin Diptychon (Timken Books, 1995); and Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow, 1992). The fiction of Chinese American poet and art critic John Yau is best understood as the transformation of a personal dilemma into a formal imperative; that is, his experience of feeling outside both his own ancestry and the American culture into which he was born has led him to produce a body of work that resists easy categorization. As he told Brian Evenson in an interview in 1998, “my interest in hybridity, and what might come after, may be due to that early realization that I wasn’t quite this or that.” Specifically, Yau’s restlessness with fixed forms has resulted in his eroding the boundary between prose poem and short story, digging at it by turns from both sides until the distinction collapses.

Books of criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Ecco Press, 1993) and The United States of Jasper Johns (Zoland, 1996). He edited an anthology of fiction, Fetish (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1998), organized a Retrospective of Ed Moses’s paintings and drawings for MOCA, LA (1996), and contributed a long essay on Robert Creeley’s poetry and poetics to the catalogue In Company: Robert Creeley’s Collaborations (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, General Electric Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. Manhattan is his homebase.