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Xu Bing Xu trained as a printmaker in Beijing. A Book from the Sky, with its invented Chinese woodblock characters, may be a stinging critique of the meaninglessness of contemporary political language.

A Book from the Sky

Shirin Neshat Neshat's photographs address the repression of women in postrevolutionary Iran. She poses in traditional veiled garb but wields a rifle and displays militant Farsi poetry on her exposed body parts.

Allegiance and Wakefulness

Jenny Saville Saville's unflattering foreshortened self-portrait "branded" with words such as delicate and petite underscores the dichotomy between the perfect bodies of fashion models and those of most people.

Branded

Andreas Gursky Gursky manipulates digital photographs to produce vast tableaus depicting characteristic places of the modern global economy. The size of his prints rivals 19th-century history paintings.

Chicago Board of Trade II

Adrian Piper In this installation, Piper, a light-skinned African American, appeared on a video monitor, "cornered" behind an overturned table, and made provocative comments about racism and bigotry.

Cornered

Andy Goldsworthy Goldsworthy's earthworks are "collaborations with nature." At St. Abbs, he split pebbles of different sizes in two, scratched white around the cracks using another stone, and then arranged them in a spiral.

Cracked Rock Spiral

Matthew Barney Barney's vast multimedia installations of drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos typify the relaxation at the opening of the 21st century of the traditional boundaries among artistic media.

Cremaster Cycle

Edward Burtynsky Burtynsky's "manufactured landscapes" are commentaries on the destructive effects on the environment of industrial plants and mines, but his photographs transform ugliness into beauty.

Densified Scrap Metal #3a, Hamilton, Ontario

Ieoh Ming Pei Egyptian stone architecture inspired Pei's postmodern entryway to the Louvre, but his glass- and-steel pyramid is a transparent tent serving as a skylight for the underground extension of the old museum.

Grand Louvre Pyramide

Frank Gehry Gehry's limestone-and-titanium Bilbao museum is an immensely dramatic building. Its disorder and seeming randomness of design epitomize Deconstructivist architectural principles.

Guggenheim Bilbao Museum

Rachel Whiteread Whiteread's monument to the 65,000 Austrian Jews who perished in the Holocaust is a tomb- like concrete block with doors that cannot be opened and library books seen from behind.

Holocaust Memorial

Willie Bester Homage to Steve Biko is a tribute to a leader of the Black Liberation movement, which protested apartheid in South Africa. References to the injustice of Biko's death fill this complex painting.

Homage to Steve Biko

Norman Foster Foster's High-Tech tower has an exposed steel skeleton featuring floors with uninterrupted working spaces. At the base is a 10-story atrium illuminated by computerized mirrors that reflect sunlight.

Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank

Gunter Behnisch The roof, walls, and windows of the Deconstruc- tivist Hysolar Institute seem to explode, avoiding any suggestion of stable masses and frustrating viewers' expectations of how a building should look.

Hysolar Institute

Tony Oursler Video artist Oursler projects his digital images onto sculptural objects, insinuating them into the "real" world. Here, he projected talking heads onto egg-shaped forms suspended from poles.

Mansheshe

Leon Golub The violence of contemporary life is the subject of Golub's huge paintings. Here, five mercenaries loom over the viewer, instilling a feeling of peril. The rough textures reinforce the raw imagery.

Mercenaries IV

Hans Haacke MetroMobiltan focuses attention on the connec- tions between political and economic conditions in South Africa and the conflicted politics of cor- porate patronage of art exhibitions.

MetroMobiltan

Kehinde Wiley Wiley's trademark paintings are reworkings of famous portraits (fig. 22-1A) in which he substitutes young African American men in contemporary dress in order to situate them in "the field of power."

Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps

Anselm Kiefer Kiefer's paintings have thickly encrusted surfaces incorporating materials such as straw. Here, the German artist used perspective to pull the viewer into an incinerated landscape alluding to the Holocaust.

Nigredo

Shahzia Sikander Imbuing miniature painting with a contemporary message about hypocrisy and intolerance, Sikander portrayed a gay friend as a homosexual Mughal emperor who enforced Muslim orthodoxy.

Perilous Order

Jeff Koons Koons creates sculptures highlighting everything he considers wrong with contemporary American consumer culture. In this work, he intertwined a centerfold nude and a cartoon character.

Pink Panther

David Hammons Hammons intended this multimedia installa- tion, with Theodore Roosevelt flanked by an African American and a Native American as servants, to reveal the racism embedded in America's cultural heritage.

Public Enemy

Marisol Escobar In a tribute to the Renaissance master, Marisol created a sculptural replica of Leonardo's Last Supper (fig. 17-4), transforming the fresco into an object. She is the seated viewer as well as the artist.

Self-Portrait Looking at the Last Supper

Christo and Jeanne-Claude Christo and Jeanne-Claude created this Environmental artwork by surrounding 11 small islands with 6.5 million square feet of pink fabric. Characteristically, the work existed for only two weeks.

Surrounded Islands

Kimio Tsuchiya Tsuchiya's sculptures consist of branches or driftwood, and despite their abstract nature, they assert the life forces found in natural materials. His approach to sculpture reflects ancient Shinto beliefs.

Symptom

Melvin Edwards Edwards's welded sculptures of chains, spikes, knife blades, and other found objects allude to the lynching of African Americans and the continuing struggle for civil rights and an end to racism.

Tambo

Cliff Whiting In this carved wooden mural depicting the Maori creation myth, Cliff Whiting revived Oceanic formal and iconographic traditions and techniques. The abstract curvilinear design suggests wind turbulence.

Tawhiri-Matea (God of the Winds)

Bill Viola Viola's video projects use extreme slow motion, contrasts in scale, shifts in focus, mirrored reflections, and staccato editing to create dramatic sensory experiences rooted in tangible reality.

The Crossing

Chris Ofili Ofili, a British-born Catholic of Nigerian descent, represented the Virgin Mary with African elephant dung on one breast and surrounded by genitalia and buttocks. The painting produced a public outcry.

The Holy Virgin Mary

Krzystof Wodiczko To publicize their plight, Wodiczko projected on the walls of a monument on Boston Common images of homeless people and their plastic bags filled with their few possessions.

The Homeless Projection

Julian Schnabel Schnabel's paintings recall the work of the gestural abstractionists, but he employs an amalgamation of media, bringing together painting, mosaic, and low-relief sculpture.

The Walk Home

Richard Serra

Tilted Arc

Renzo Piano A pioneering example of "green architecture," Piano's complex of 10 bam- boo units, based on traditional New Caledonian village huts, has adjustable skylights in the roofs for natural climate control.

Tjibaou Cultural Centre

Keith Haring Haring burst onto the New York art scene as a subway graffito artist and quickly gained an international reputation. His Pisa mural features his signature cartoonlike characters and is a hymn to life.

Tuttomondo

Jenny Holzer Holzer's 1989 installation consisted of electronic signs created using LED technology. The continuous display of texts wound around the Guggenheim Museum's spiral interior ramp.

Untitled

Kiki Smith Asking "Who controls the body?" Kiki Smith sculpted two life-size wax figures of a nude man and woman with body fluids running from the woman's breasts and down the man's leg.

Untitled

Tara Donovan Donovan's sculptures consist of everyday components, such as straws, plastic cups, and wire. The abstract forms suggest rolling landscapes, clouds, fungus, and other natural forms.

Untitled (2003)

Barbara Kruger Kruger has explored the "male gaze" in her art. Using the layout techni- ques of mass media, she constructed this word-and-photograph collage to challenge culturally constructed notions of gender.

Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face)

Maya Ying Lin Like Minimalist sculpture, Lin's memorial to veterans of the Vietnam War is a simple geometric form. Its inscribed polished walls actively engage viewers in a psychological dialogue about the war.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Zaha Hadid Inspired by Suprematism, Hadid employed dynamically arranged, una- dorned planes for the Vitra Fire Station. The design suggests the burst of energy of firefighters racing out to extinguish a blaze.

Vitra Fire Station

David Wojnarowicz In this disturbing yet eloquent print, Wojnarowicz overlaid typed commentary on a photo- graph of skeletal remains. He movingly communicated his feelings about watching a loved one die of AIDS.

When I Put My Hands on Your Body

Faith Ringold In this quilt, a medium associated with women, Ringgold presented a tribute to her mother that also addresses African American culture and the struggles of women to overcome oppression.

Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?

Wu Guanzhong In a brilliant fusion of traditional Chinese subject matter and tech- nique with modern Western Abstract Expressionism, Wu depicted the wild vines of the Yangtze River valley.

Wild Vines with Flowers Like Pearls

Frank Gehry The glass-walled atrium of the Guggen- heim Bilbao Museum soars skyward 165 feet. The asymmetrical and imbalanced screens and vaults flow into one another, creating a sense of disequilibrium.

atrium of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museo

Jean-Michel Basquiat In this tribute to two legendary African American musicians, Basquiat combined bold colors, fractured figures, and graffiti to capture the dynamic rhythms of jazz and the excitement of New York.

horn players

Paa Joe The caskets of Paa Joe take many forms, including items of clothing, airplanes, and automobiles. The forms always relate to the deceased, but many collectors buy the caskets as art objects.

running shoe, airplane, automobile, and other coffins

Robert Mapplethorpe Mapplethorpe's Perfect Moment show led to a landmark court case on freedom of expression for artists. In this self-portrait, an androgynous Mapplethorpe confronts the viewer with a steady gaze.

self-portrait