Introducing The Chinese Art Book

The Chinese Art Book examines the art of the oldest continuous civilisation on earth. Full of surprises for the reader new to Chinese art as well as for specialists, its unique arrangement breaks new ground by pairing works that speak to one another in unexpected historical, stylistic and cultural ways. Visually exciting pages allow each object to stand alone and at the same time to be viewed in conjunction with a carefully selected companion, producing illuminating and often inspiring pairings. The dialogue between each couple invites meanings that often go far beyond those of the individual works. Every form of Chinese visual art is featured - painting, calligraphy, sculpture, ceramics, figurines, jades, bronzes, gold and silver, photography, video, installation and performance art. The works date from Neolithic cultures of the fourth millennium BC to the most recent contemporary art being produced in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the West

Phaidon production controller Laurence Poos worked on the production of The Chinese Art book, ensuring all the images sourced from around the world were presented in their best light (and colour) and choosing the most appropriate paper stock on which to present such stunning imagery - both contemporary and ancient.

The challenging aspect of books like these, where it's a big collection of artworks from all over the globe is usually the picture research, because the images tend to come from such varying sources. Diane and Tom (Mellick), the editors, did a fantastic job in getting all the images to me, pretty much on time. In the case of this book they're not just paintings, there's photography, sculpture, lots of scrolls - so they ended up coming from anywhere and everywhere. Some of the old Northern Song paintings were a challenge. You try to make them look as true as possible to how they looked when they were originally created but this is offset by the fact that a lot of the time it is an old object and you don't want to make it any more glamorous than it should look. There was one picture that came in incredibly saturated (Emperor Xuanzong's Flight to Shu attributed to Li Zhaodao) an ink and colour on silk drawing dating from the late 8th to mid 9th century. When it came in it was essentially bright red. So we had to de-saturate it to make it look like it would have when it was painted. We have colour references from the era via the editor, and they give us other representations of the image. Obviously, if it's a modern work we will use a match print where possible. Colour matching the images to make the pairings on each spread work as best they could was a bit challenging in this case because I wasn't able to proof them in order as the final order was only decided at the end, so I had to look at the book again at the end to make sure everything sat together correctly. We went for coated paper inside the book because that gives you nice colours for any kinds of artwork and photography too - it holds the bright colours very well and keeps everything nicely in line. I really like the cover design of this book. As soon as I heard it was to be calligraphy I knew the cover had to go on off-white uncoated paper as scripts and scrolls featuring calligraphy would traditionally be uncoated. We decided to treat the calligrapher's seal and our Phaidon logo in the same fashion on the case to create a unity between the 'logos', modern and old. Rather than use the 'Chinese red' on the jacket we decided that it would create a better contrast to use red paper for the case only, peaking out from underneath the jacket. I think the colours (red, paper-white and black) work really well together, a very clean but effective design. My favourite image from the book? That has to be Huang Yongyu's Winking Owl on page 127!