Developing his idea with Chien, Zheng came up with Yishu as an answer to the lack of in-depth material on contemporary Chinese art for non-Chinese readers.
About face
Maybe it was the Chinese concern regarding face that made Chien give meticulous attention to Yishu's appearance -- the magazine's impeccable design is a step up from her two Art & Collections.
"We want this publication to show exquisite taste in content, layout and printing," Chien said, pointing to the neat cover design of monochrome red and the pleasantly clean fonts and layout. The often irrelevant photos of artists and scholars during meetings, common in Chinese-language art publications, are reduced to thumbnail size, making room for cleaner text format. However, a casual glance of the pages offers too few explanatory pictures.
"In the future, the volume will be more massive with more and bigger photos. When it comes to works of art, a photo speaks much more than text," Chien said.
Yishu may not need too much text but it needs to be well-written. It took Zheng more than an year to recruit writers and editors with native-speaker-level English who are also versed in contemporary Chinese or Taiwanese art. The staff are all part-timers with jobs in other fields. "So that their horizons are broader," Chien explained.
That broader horizon is what Yishu wants to offer. The first issue roughly focuses on Chinese culture vs contemporary art, with a large portion devoted to transcriptions of interviews with and panel discussions among artist, critics, curators and others.
Although aspiring to be an "academic journal reflecting the scholarship in the field of contemporary Chinese art and culture," in Zheng's words, Yishu is also trying to be accessible to the general public. As the magazine's premiere issue arrives at collectors' homes and college libraries in New York and London, it remains to be seen if it will stay there.
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