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Kirk Pedersen: Urban Asia

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KIRK URBAN ASIA is a large format photography book with 85 color reproductions from Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and several cities in China. It is not a travel book and is unlike any other book on the cities of Asia. Photographer Jeff Brouws writes in the No other artist-photographer is doing exactly what he's doing. With this fluid approach, traveling from city to city with no grand theme in mind, his work is distinctly different from his contemporaries. Michael Wolf shoots exclusively in Hong Kong and China; Edward Burtynsky's extensive coverage of the Three Gorges Dam Project and other industrial sites has happened often within the territorial limits of China; and Sze Tsung Leong history images - scenes of rampant development and architectural spectacle - are confined to Shanghai. While they all might share continents and countries they don't share viewpoints. Pedersen's eclectic stance creates a different photographic yield - he reclaims the commonplace and the fragmentary in these spaces/places... Hardcover, cloth with paper jacket, edition 1000, 12 x 12 inches, Japanese matt paper with spot vanished images. Also available is a Special Edition with a signed photo in a clamshell box - edition 100 (40 reserved for the artist).

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2009

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Profile Image for Grady.
Author 51 books1,827 followers
November 26, 2018
Seeing the Unnoticed: An Homage to Differences

Kirk Pedersen is a gifted painter, an artist whose eyes find areas of beauty and fascination in the most unlikely places - places that to other pedestrians are simply matrices for passing to the next destination. His paintings of urban objects and trodden broken streets, walls, and dwellings have garnered respect for his art for a number of years now.

But this splendid book is not so much about the artist's transferring to canvas what his hungry eyes find as significant visual data. Instead this luxuriously designed, bound, and slip cased art book is a collection of photographs Kirk Pedersen has gathered for the past years during his inquisitive and soulfully hungry sojourns to Asia. The result is a collection of richly colored photographs of the urban life and foundations of cities in China, Phnom Penh, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Bangkok. Pedersen's eye and lens capture 'ordinary' sights and focus them into masterful messages of color, life, decay, spirit, and excitement. What makes Pedersen's work so majestic is the inherent simplicity of his chosen subject matter, molding this matter into patterns of lush color and sensual design that allows the viewer to see, perhaps for the first time, how spiritually connected the surface of the universe is.

Enhancing this unique portfolio of photographs of Urban Asia are essays by David Pagel and Jeff Brouws, essays that not only inform the reader of the artist's past and skills, but also provide other portals to view Pedersen's visions with added light. This is an elegant and eloquent book, well worth the collector's investment. In limited editio.n
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