Will you co-publish “I Miss You Already” by Shen Wei?

As a publishing platform for contemporary art, Minor Matters create printed books in collaboration with their audience through a pre-sell model. They develop a $50 book, then present it to their audience, for a maximum of six months. When at least 500 of you make an advanced purchase, the book goes into design and production, and is shipped to you upon completion. The first 500 people who purchase are listed within the book, along with the artists, writers, and printers who are part of making the book happen.

Founder Michelle Dunn Marsh, with partners Steve McIntyre and Robin Held recognize that what is lesser seen can be of great importance. That attention to detail is valuable and significant art and ideas may stay on the fringes without the support of a community.

Today’s featured title is “I Miss You Already” a self-portrait series by Shen Wei, a great artist who answered a few of our questions in September 2007.

Born and raised in Shanghai, Shen Wei is an artist currently based in New York City. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Chinese in America, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Kinsey Institute, among others; he has been exhibited internationally, and featured in The New Yorker, Aperture, ARTNews, and GQChina among other respected publications. His first book, Chinese Sentiment, was published by Charles Lane Press in 2011.

Though the United States thinks of itself as progressive, and in many ways it is, controversy is still easily stimulated around visualization of the human form, particularly through photography. All too frequently nudity is automatically associated with illicit behavior, without regard for the intention of the photograph or of the photographer. Association with representation of the human body is still forbidden by even socially-aware corporations that equate nudity with underage drinking and drug use, implying it is essentially illegal, and drawing no distinction between abusive images of sexual control and exploitation, and sculptural, psychological, intimate studies of the human condition through the bodies we occupy. Once again it is the realm and responsibility of contemporary art to challenge these assumptions.

Please join Minor Matters in celebrating Shen Wei’s sensitive and powerful explorations of the human form. They can’t publish the book without you.