Almost a decade after the first edition, User’s Manual 2.0 starts 11 years earlier and ends nine years later, profiling 101 artists from Turkey in this massive tome edited by artist Halil Altındere and writer Süreyyya Evren. While each artist gets two spreads of glossy images representing their practice, the front third of the volume contains 16 bilingual (Turkish-English) texts—some reprised from the first edition, others newly commissioned—surveying the development of contemporary art and its ecosystem amid Turkey’s economic and political opening to the world. New contributions primarily come from past Istanbul Biennial curators (such as Fulya Erdemci, Charles Esche, Hou Hanru and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev), and also include Ahu Antmen’s survey of gender constructs in late 20th-century Turkey and Osman Erden’s overview of the last 15 years, packing maximum information about a nation’s art scene into a single tome. 

The very first monograph on Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen investigates the genesis of a body of work that consistently comprises used clothing, cement, suitcases or combinations thereof, as metaphors for memory, demolition and globalization. One of three main contributors, art historian Wu Hung delves into these thematic “threads,” discoursing on the artist’s sculptures, installations and public interventions as bearers of lived experiences, odes to cities metamorphized in the name of progress and critiques of power structures—in worlds of commerce or international relations—that homogenize local and global spaces and communities. Yin’s voice is heard regularly throughout the book, whether in interviews, copious quotes embedded in essays or her own—previously unpublished—writings on specific projects. Husband and fellow artist Song Dong’s photo tour around her studio and an illustrated chronology of past exhibitions dating back to 1994 round off the steady survey.