American Fried Rice: The Art of Mu Pan Hardcover – November 24, 2020

This artist did the art of Midsomer, and I absolutely loved that piece. We all enjoyed looking through this book, it's gorgeous and disturbing art. My favorite.

We are long-time fans of the art of Mu Pan. American Fried Rice is a beautiful and captivating collection of his work that will have a home on our coffee table for a long time. His art is mesmerizing and provocative. The book is extraordinary.

Dope as hell. Been a fan for years on Instagram, managed to snag one print from static medium, got one of the last copies of this book. Gorgeous, explicit, real, raw. A+ I fux with my man Mu Pan!

100% worth it buy it won’t regret it.

Great book! Lots of pictures, beautifully printed. Worth the price.

Beautiful book showcasing one of the most brilliant artists around!

Mu Pan's work has such an overwhelming impact that one struggles to describe it in words. The go-to is often comparison. "Mu Pan's art is like Bruegel and Kuniyoshi and Darger and Dix and Bosch" and so on and so on. All valid comparisons, but I find this inadequate. His work is utterly unique. When describing the subject of his work I see even more of a struggle. People often mistake them for illustration because of how incredibly narrative his work is. The paintings are composed of many figures across long horizontal panels and are so detailed that they must be "read". A single image can be composed of hundreds of vignettes. Small moments in time that reveal a complex and violent story. Every painting is a story and this book collects them into such an epic.My only criticism of American Fried Rice is that it crams so many pieces into one volume with not not enough details. The work in this book could have been easily spread across five volumes as each piece requires multiple details and essays to present them properly. There is too much art in this book! Highest possible recommendation!

The Taiwanese-born art-movement-on-legs known as Mu Pan brings us Brueghelian battlescapes via Raqib Shaw & Walton Ford - & Henry Darger, which is painfully evident upon further reading - every page exploding with violence & vibrance & visionary brilliance. There's a complete lack of art school pretense, as Pan gives zero f@#!$, repeatedly & blissfully committing the cardinal Modernist sin of Narrative on paper & canvas & wood. Evil, campy narratives. Like Bosch's 'The Temptation of St.Anthony' or 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' (of which Pan, like Shaw, provides his own wonderfully grotesque reinterpretation) there's micro & macroscopic stories crawling across every square inch of paper, a riot of jokes & mysteries & blasphemies that are both endlessly compelling & - *GASP* - entertaining!... And there's depth in those details. Historical context & hidden symbolism & all the exciting intellectual crap that gets the art-hags wet & scribbling. No true artist or artist-illustrator should ever strive to be 'entertaining', but if it spontaneously happens as a by-product of their torturous, self-flagellating artistic process, it's a good thing. James Ensor is entertaining as hell, and so is Breugel, Goya, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Francis Bacon. Lately, not so much. I don't think I could conscientiously use the word 'entertaining' to describe more than a handful of 'mainstream' contemporary artists - Ford, Shaw, Akira Yamaguchi, Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz, Ali Banisadr, Glenn Brown, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Jonas Burgert, Daniel Pitin, Mark Tansey, Manabu Ikeda, Vincent Desiderio, Aida Makoto, Neo Rauch, and Ruprecht Von Kaufmann - all of whom represent the best & the brightest... and NONE of whom represent Modernist idealism. There are quite a few more artists in the High-Low ghetto, meanwhile, who can capture the attention, engage the intellect, & challenge the viewer themselves - the abyss gazing back - almost as well as the artists just mentioned... and far, FAR better than most of the Modernist & Postmodernist con-artists bilking hollowed-out 1%-ers as they try to impress whoever-the-haeckel with their manufactured tastes. Has anyone ever felt anything looking at Piet Mondrian's multi-colored squares inside black & white grids? Besides boredom? No? FLUNK No. And if you said 'Yes', you're lying to yourself, and you're going to hell or an Atheist Oblivion. Haven't you ever gazed in anxious silence at one of the many Yves Klein canvases featuring a solid field of his trademarked 'Klein International Blue', desperately wishing it was a very-blue pond... in which there is a Communist Berserker-Toad, armed with the serrated forelimb of a Praying Mantis, astride the shell of his War Tortoise, preparing to slaughter a company of The Croaking Leopard Frog Resistance? Of course you have.I'll take Mu Pan over 99% of the Modernist douchebags celebrated in textbooks promulgating the Marxist-revisionism of Art History every time; confidently betting on the spry 'Gen-X'-er over the mouldering 'Gen-P' Euro-skeleton according to whatever variables you care to name... beyond the meaningless critical fellatio of 'Art Forum', or 'Art International'. Mu Pan's charmingly genocidal wargy-porn is boiling with the flora & fauna of Natural History masters like Audubon or Nicolas Robert, sometimes structured according to the kaleidoscopic symmetry of the mandala, & at other times - as mentioned earlier - filtered via the pictographic languages of Raqib Shaw & Walton Ford. Yes, I'm a fan of both, so maybe I'm just seeing their particular brands of totem symbolism everywhere. Or maybe not. To me, the conspicuous absence of those two names, in the otherwise frank & entertaining interview with Pan, suggests that both Shaw & Ford are far too much of an influence for him to consciously acknowledge. All artists are, by necessity, filthy, rotten thieves... to paraphrase Picasso. And I think that deep down, there's a nagging sense of guilt & shame that gently tortures the most talented & driven of these irredeemable reprobates. But culture spreads & mutates through these little thefts, each generation borrowing from the one that preceded it; and Mu Pan is no hack.I don't think 'entertainment' is something any artist - or illustrator - should be struggling to produce, but any image that can elicit a strong emotional AND intellectual response is 'fine art' by my definition, regardless of the presence of Transformers and/or dinosaurs locked in mortal kombat. Pan's love for Persian miniatures & traditional Chinese & Japanese art is evident, as is the influence of the art of Natural History & Japanese Manga. Joe Coleman, maybe. Peers like Rob Sato, and his pal James Jean (his art-school classmate for all four years). Whether he's scribbling in ballpoint, using watercolors, or slathering acrylic on wood, Mu Pan kills it. Fun, occasionally breathtaking shiznit.'American Fried Rice: The Art of Mu Pan' is the 7th Cernunnos title I've added to my shelf in the last couple of years. As an Abrams imprint, they've largely been focused on High-Low visual culture, publishing monographs by artists from the realms of Pop Surrealism, underground & small press comics, or 'bespoke' film & concert print illustration. The books on the art of Dave Cooper, Ryan Heshka & Christian Rex Van Minnen are all highly recommended; but one of the most recent, 'Mirages: The Art of Laurent Durieux' was a huge disappointment. As one of the world's greatest living illustrators, this collection of Durieux' work for companies like 'Mondo' & 'Nautilus' was one I was eagerly anticipating. Unfortunately, they screwed it up(!), using a matte paper-stock that drained his brilliant colors of their vibrancy, & made a dull slurry of his intricate, gorgeously rendered line-work - the keystone of his retro-futuristic style - originally modelled on the masters of 19th century wood & steel engraving, and re-envisioned for a full-color, digital approach. A good matte stock can work anywhere betwixt excellent & serviceable when it's matched with the right ink & the right content (it worked fine for 'Zoologia: The Art of Stan Manoukian'), but in general, thick, dense, finely-grained coated paper is the best choice for art-books & color comics. Going with a bilingual edition didn't help matters, but I wouldn't have minded if they'd used the same kind of paper that Insight Editions used for 'The Art of Mondo' (it featured a good selection of the Belgian artists' work, providing very clear reminders of just how great it looks when the publisher doesn't make regrettable, cost-saving production decisions in order to maximize profits). Or the kind of paper Cernunnos used for 'American Fried Rice'. This is a beautifully produced book, printed & bound in Italy, which is always a good thing, in my experience (no offence, China). It features several foldouts to better appreciate both the epic scale, and provides a very complete look at Pan's oeuvre, including a healthy heaping serving of his mesmerizing sketchbooks, with their anarchic ballpoint immolation of blank sanctity. Blanctity. If you're a fan of James Jean, Tiffany Bozic, Skinner or Rob Sato, you should buy this book immediately, & just tell your landlord he's out of luck. COVID, !@#$%. Times are tough, etc.; but art-lovers must have art to love... How could he fail to see the logic? If you're basically still a child inside, see the previous two sentences regarding art & landlords. If you're basically still an actual child, ask-tell your parents to buy it. If you're basically dead inside, this book might be the panacea you're looking for. Emotionally dead inside, that is. If you're feeling cancerously dead inside, consult an oncologist... &/or a funeral home... then buy the book & will it forward.