Yuji AgematsuFour Seasons

“Four Seasons is a unique artist book presenting Yuji Agematsu’s renowned zips, miniature sculptures comprised of reanimated urban detritus collected by Agematsu on daily walks in New York City and encased within the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packs.
The publication accompanies an exhibition at the Secession, Vienna, of 366–one per day–of these arrangements from 2020, that infamous calendar year. The book features images of a selected month from each of the four seasons.
Designed by Claus Due, this Swiss brochure-bound edition ingeniously contains two books in one, organizing the lusciously reproduced, enlarged views of individual selected days from the zip works on the left, and the corresponding pages of the artist’s meticulous, diary-like notebooks in which he records each day’s trove on the right.
The essay written by philosopher and Urbanomic publisher Robin Mackay incisively captures and theorizes the spirit of the artist’s daily assemblages, likening them to video game creator Keita Takahashi’s “clump spirit [katamari damashii, 塊魂]—a cosmic disposition which places great hope in the obsessional collecting of heterogeneous stuff.” Gathering inspiration from a wide swath of sources including Plato, Philip K. Dick, Zoolander and Dante’s Paradiso, Mackay pays homage to Agematsu’s work.” Revolver Publishing