The John Solt Kitasono Katue Collection

Kitasono and VOU Online

Curator Noda Naotoshi on Kitasono via LACMA (link)

David Karwan on Kitasono Katue’s design work via LACMA (link)

Aoki Eiko on Kitasono at LACMA (link)

Aoki Eiko interviews curator Hollis Goodall on Kitasono (link)

Jerome Rothenberg on Kitasono at Jacket2 (link)

Poems in translation and more from Karl Young’s Light and Dust Anthology (link)

John Solt on the erasure of the pre-war Japanese avant-garde (link)

John Solt on VOU and Yamamoto Kansuke (link)

Arai Toyomi on Kitasono, Sagawa Chika, Ema Shōko, Nakamura Chio, and Yamanaka Tomiko (link)

Translator Eric Selland on Kitasono and John Solt’s work (link)

Recent Exhibitions and Books

Hashimoto Heihachi and Kitasono Katue: Unusual Pair of Brothers, Setagaya Art Museum, Mie Prefecture Museum, 2010. (link)*

Kitasono Katue: Surrealist Poet, LA County Museum of Art, 2012. (link)*

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, Museum of Modern Art, 2012.*

Idea Magazine No. 364, 2014. Issue devoted to Kitasono Katue and Kiyohara Etsushi’s design work. (link)

Solt, John. Japanese Translation of Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 2010)

Solt, John. Japanese Translation of Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning (Tokyo: Shigetsusha, 2017), special edition designed by Ohie Toshio. **

Ed. Jean-François Bory, Jacques Donguy, Marie Kawazu. Kitasono Katué 1902-1978 (Les Presses du Reel, 2023).

Ed. Taylor Mignon and Karl Young, VOU Visual Poetry, Tokio: 1958-1978 (Isobar Press: 2022). (link) (excerpt)

Selections from the John Solt Kitasono Katué Archive, Renzo Piano Building, 565 Broome St, New York, Asia Week March 2023 (link)

Print Resources

Erber, Pedro Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).

Hirata, Hosea. Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 

Kanazawa, Hitoshi, Horie, Tokiyuki. Kitasono Katué photographs : 北園克衛の造型詩 (Tōkyō: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2002). 

Kitasono, Katue. Trans. John Solt, Ed. Karl Young. Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space (Los Angeles: highmoonoon, 2009)

Kitasono, Katue. trans. John Solt. Glass Beret (Morgan Press, 1995).

Linhartova, Vera. Dada et Surrealism au Japon (Paris: Publications orientalistes de France, 1987).

Mignon, Taylor. “The Literary Avant-Garde in Japan: Vou Research Notes,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Arts and Sciences, Issue 42 (2001).

Munro, Majella. Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan. (Enzo Press, 2012).

Sas, Miryam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Solt, John. Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999).

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).

Wu, Chinghsin. Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

Wu, Chinghsin. “Reality Within and Without: Surrealism in Japan and China in the Early 1930s,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society (December 2014);