Launched in 2007, Yishu is pleased to offer limited edition prints and photographs by some of today’s most important Chinese artists.

Each edition is commissioned by and entirely produced for Yishu. This project makes available to our readers and collectors high quality artwork that will raise funds for Yishu and ensure its ongoing contribution to promoting awareness and knowledge about contemporary Chinese art.

All editions are USD 300 each, and availabe only in Vancouver and Beijing. To purchase a Yishu edition print please send your request to lara@yishujournal.com or call 1.604.726.5909 (Canada), or contact Katherine Don +86.158.1018.9440 (China).

NOTE: Each print is measured 210 by 295 mm, which is the equivalent size of the Journal, and is packaged in a special folder along with a certificate issued by Yishu Journal.



YISHU ART EDITION NO. 1


Artist: Xu Bing

Title: Book from the Ground

Year of Creation: 2007

Media: Ink on paper

Dimension: 210 x 295 mm, signed by the artist. Produced by Xu Bing Studio, New York.

Edition Size: 199

Price: USD 300 plus shipping

image [top]: Xu Bing's Book from the Ground, 2007


Xu Bing's double-sided digital print is related to his recent project, Book from the Ground, which was shown at MOMA/NYC in the exhibition Automatic Update, June 27- September 10, 2007.

More information about Book from the Ground can be found on page 70 in the June 2007 issue of Yishu.

Artist's Statement:

“Book from the Ground is a novel written in a 'language of icons' that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able to understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life. We have also created a 'font library' computer program to accompany the book. The user can type English sentences (we are still limited in this way, but the next step will include Chinese and other major languages) and the computer will instantaneously translate them into this language of icons. It can function as a 'dictionary,' and in the future it will have practical applications.”





YISHU ART EDITION NO. 2





Artist: Ding Yi

Title: Crosses 08

Year of creation: 2008

Media: Serigraphy

Dimension: 295 x 210 mm

Edition Size: 200

Price: USD 300 plus shipping

Excerpts from “About Ding Yi” by Hou Hanru:

Since the mid-1980s, Ding Yi has produced an immense body of abstract paintings on different supports, from canvas to cardboard, from ready-made fabrics to furniture, using diverse media, such as oil, acrylic, charcoal and ballpoint pen, His colors are also varied, ranging from quasi-monochrome to vast combinations. The results create constantly oscillating impulses on our retinas and therefore highly exciting perceptions….

Within all this variation, however, Ding Yi’s paintings are also excessively repetitive and systematic. All his works are motifs: 十 and 示, the two most basic elements in color printing technology. Ding Yi appropriates these "primitive" elements and transforms them into the essential structure, the unique "content" of his painting. Ding Yi’s engagement with these simplest marks reduces painting to its minimal state. In other words, the process of painting for him is no longer a search for any narrative or emotional expression. His subject matter is by no means "painterly"; these characters are simply traces of hand-writing.

For Ding Yi painting is a test for his boundless determination. This determination is first and foremost a perennial pursuit for an independent position in an art world infatuated with fashions and trends. In this context, his choice to remain unchanged can be understood as a strong reaction against such a "mainstream."

-From Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, by Barry Schwabsky, published by Phaidon Press Ltd., New York, USA, 2002, Page 84.





YISHU ART EDITION NO. 3





Artist: Wei Guangqing

Title: Made in China (2008)

Media: Silkscreen print

Dimension: 210 x 295 mm

Edition Size: 198

Price: USD 300 plus shipping

Wei Guangqing (b. 1962, Wuhan) is recognized as one of the earliest Chinese artists to explore the language of Pop Art, which became a mainstream trend in the 1980s and early 1990s. His works were labeled as “Cultural Pop” for its appropriation of traditional images juxtaposed with cultural symbols. His use of the red brick wall has become his trademark ready-made image, one that symbolizes the background of Chinese culture and politics.

This image is a unique seriograph of the 2004 canvas painting titled Made in China, which references the transition of contemporary Chinese art into a consumerist culture. As part of The Extended Virtuous Words series, named after a Chinese classic with the same title, he adopts the visual format of popular folk woodblock prints that were widely disseminated to the masses in the early 20th century. Wei’s works are recognized for his subversion of tradition and culture as he replaces the virtuous words with a unifying red wall in hopes to “extend” the meaning of his ideas.




YISHU ART EDITION NO. 4





Artist: Rong Rong & Inri

Title: 2004 No. 2 Caochangdi, Beijing: Rong Rong & Inri (2008)

Media: Digital photograph on Hahnemühle rag paper

Dimension: 295 x 210 mm

Edition Size: 200

Price: USD 300 plus shipping

Signed by the artists; produced by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.


Taken in June 2004 in front of their new Beijing home in Caochangdi, Rong Rong & Inri’s classic family portrait captures the excitement of the first-time parents. This emotion is echoed in a similar photograph taken in 2008 in anticipation of their third child. The photograph was recently exhibited in the artists’ solo exhibition celebrating the one-year anniversary of Three Shadows, a photography center which they founded together. Weaving together their personal lives and their art, the work represents, in the words of Wu Hung, “the birth of new place intertwined with that of human lives.”

Originally appearing as a hand-dyed silver gelatin print, the photograph has been reprinted in limited edition on Hahnemühle rag paper especially for Yishu Journal.




YISHU ART EDITION NO. 5





Artist: Wang Guangyi

Title: Great Criticism—Wang Guangyi (2009)

Media: Serigraph

Dimension: 210 x 295 mm

Edition Size: 200

Price: USD 300 plus shipping

Signed by the artist; produced by A Space Art, Beijing.


Wang Guangyi (b. 1957) is a central figure of the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own name as a substitute for luxury brand names common to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience of China’s changing society.




YISHU ART EDITION NO. 6





Artist: Hong Hao and Yan Lei

Title: Invitation (2010)

Media: printed on paper

Dimension: 295 x 205 mm

Edition Size: 300

Price: USD 300 plus shipping

Signed by the artist.

When the list was announced for the participants of the 1997 Documenta X, a prestigious international showcase of contemporary art hosted in Kassel, Germany, Chinese artists felt snubbed when not one artist from China was included. Shortly after news of their rejection, dozens of Chinese artists received a letter signed by Ielnay Oahgnoh inviting them to participate in a special ancillary show, “From the Other Shore--An exhibition of the Vanguard of Chinese Art”. It was soon revealed that the letter itself was in fact an elaborate hoax by the artists Hong Hao and Yan Lei who in fact fabricated the invitations, signed their own names backwards as the name of the elusive curator, mailed them to artists from Germany, and listed a public telephone number for unsuspecting recipients to contact. The two perpetrators were found themselves in extreme disfavor among their contemporaries, but their act of conceptual creativity has since passed into legend.

More than a decade later, an original signed “Invitation” is now available in a limited edition, exclusively produced for the support of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Where Chinese artists once felt excluded from major international art exhibitions largely organized by Western curators, this open invitation is a document of how far contemporary Chinese art has come--anyone is invited. Each edition may be individually inscribed by the collector.