★The work by Jean-Paul Boudier, Professor of the University of California, Berkeley! His images with unique style, skilled passion and compelling imagination balance across the nexus of multiple crafts of painting, poetry, and performance art.

★Plenty of surrealist illustrations and short humorous text make this surprisingly insightful book a fun, informative and quick read.

★Readable for all ages 0-99 ! Not only for naivete children curious about the unknown of themselves and the world, but also for all readers seek for self-development and interested in exploring human nature.

The lush surreal illustrations of this book and its short humoristic story telling make it a fun, quick read for all ages and for anyone obliquely interested in our thirst for development and the nature of who we are. Through a poetic parody of human’s desires for more of everything, we become aware that such a quest does not bring us any closer to knowing ourselves or seeing, as contemporary scientific or spiritual leaders are telling us: all things and beings of our planet are intimately related, alive and ultimately “One.”

While each colorful painting alludes to our close relationship with the world, short lines innocently and wryly comment on the predicaments of our lives pertaining to the industrial world, where dream and reality often appear intertwined. Through the shifting identities of forms, this album gives us a glance at our own formless nature and how our excessive wish for love, home, comfort, power, and productivity inexorably transforms our worldview and make us bypass our deep infinite nature, which cannot be contained through words. As some indigenous traditions have taught us: “life is like a dream. One wonders whether it is by living that we dream or by dreaming that we live.”

Jean Paul Bourdier

Jean Paul Bourdier is a Professor of Architecture, Photography and Visual Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a photographer of unique style, skilled passion and compelling imagination. His images balance across the nexus of multiple crafts – among them painting, poetry, and performance art.

His work is stunningly original, brimming with self-assurance, and paradoxically, both simple and yet complex. Each image is a unique scene – created, staged, captured - of natural landscapes joined with the human form, expressing beauty, truth and wonder in the physical plane, as well as what is in our imaginations.

Jean-Paul uses no digital enhancement; it is all analog photography. What you see is what was really there.

His earlier photographic publications include Leap Into the Blue, 2012; Bodyscapes, 2007; and he has authored books on traditional dwellings in West Africa (Vernacular Architecture of West Africa, 2011, Habiter Un Monde, 2005: Drawn From African Dwellings, 1996, and African Spaces, 1986) written with Trinh T. Minh-ha. He has collaborated with Trinh T. Minh-ha on several installations including The Desert is Watching (2003 Kyoto Art Biennale, Japan) and L’Autre marche (2006 Musee du Quai Branly, Paris).

He was co-producer and co-director of eight feature-length films directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha. He was born and raised in France, taught in Italy and Senegal, and moved to the US where he has taught in several universities. He permanently resides in California.

Bourdier has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including Guggenheim, UC President's Humanities, and Getty awards.