[Photo/China Daily]

Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art in Its Struggle to Be Understood, by Grayson Perry

When the British artist Grayson Perry was selected in 2003 for the Turner Prize, one of Europe's most prestigious art awards, he showed up at the ceremony wearing a dress. That very public display of his cross-dressing is an integral part of his persona－outrageous but amiable, eccentric but unthreatening.

Since then his popularity has only grown, and in 2013 he was invited to deliver the Reith Lectures, the BBC's annual series of radio talks by influential thinkers. Now they have been published as Playing to the Gallery, a slender volume with charming illustrations reminiscent of some of Maira Kalman's New Yorker drawings.