{"product_id":"hyperart-thomasson","title":"Hyperart: Thomasson","description":"\u003cp\u003eLiterary Nonfiction. Art. East Asia Studies. In the 1970s Tokyo, artist Akasegawa Genpei and his friends began noticing what they termed hyperart, aesthetic objects created by removing a structures function, while carefully maintaining the structure itself. They called these objects Thomassons, after an American pinchhitter recruited by a Japanese baseball team, whose bat never connected with a ball. In the 1980s, through submissions from students and readers, Akasegawa collected and printed photos of Thomassons in a column in Super Photo Magazine. He wrote these columns with a warm, goofy humor that seems intended to cast back nihilism, irony, and other common responses to 20th century urbanization. What emerged was a lighthearted, yet profound, picture of how modernization was changing Japans urban landscape, and the culture that underpinned it. These columns, collected into a book, became a cult hit among lateeighties Japanese youth. What they saw in this assemblage of casual photos and humorous descriptions was, as essayist Jordan Sand puts it, a way of regaining some sense of the human imprint on the city in an era when that imprint was being rapidly erased.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Brand: Kaya Press","offers":[{"title":"Akasegawa, Genpei \/ paperback","offer_id":47839840043253,"sku":"SONG1885030460","price":96.62,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/5804\/8501\/files\/71RTN8nfCrL.jpg?v=1773747262","url":"https:\/\/ergodebooks.com\/products\/hyperart-thomasson","provider":"Ergodebooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}