Pi Li

ACTIVE BACKLIST

CAOCHANGDI, BEIJING INSIDE OUT
Text by Mary-Ann Ray, Pi Li, Robert E. Mangurian, Darien Williams.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9789881752246 | US $24.95
Pub Date: 10/31/2009
Active | In stock

IN PRODUCTION MODE, CONTEMPORARY ART IN CHINA
Edited by Pi Li. Text by Pauline J. Yao, Chris Dercon, Ken Lum, Ruth Noack.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9789881752291 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 4/1/2009
Active | In stock

LIU WEI: 2006-2007
Edited by Waling Boers. Text by Pi Li, Philip Tinari, Gao Shiming.
BLUE KINGFISHER/BOERS-LI GALLERY
ISBN: 9789881714329 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 4/1/2009
Active | Awaiting stock

LIU XIAODONG: PAINTING FROM LIFE
Text by Ai Weiwei, Pi Li.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9787536233003 | US $120.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2008
Active | Awaiting stock

WEI QINGJI
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9789889926496 | US $32.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2008
Active | In stock

JI DACHUN
Text by Bernhard Fibicher, Ah Cheng, Zhao Li, Pi Li.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9789889960926 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 7/1/2007
Active | In stock

CHINA ONWARD THE ESTELLA COLLECTION: CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART, 1966-2006
LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
ISBN: 9788791607387 | US $85.00
Pub Date: 7/1/2007
Active | In stock

XU YONG: BACKDROPS AND BACKDROPS
Edited by He Hao. Interviews by Britta Erickson, Pi Li.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9789889901516 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 4/1/2007
Active | In stock

WANG GONGXIN & LIN TIANMIAO: HERE? OR THERE?
Edited by He Hao. Essays by Britta Erickson and Pi Li.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9789889868079 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 8/15/2006
Active | Awaiting stock

ZHENG GUOGU
Edited by Jean Marc Decrop. Essays by Hu Fang, Gutierrez & Portefaix and Pi Li.
MAP BOOK PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9789889839512 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 12/15/2005
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

TOUCHING THE STONES
Edited by Waling Boers, Pi Li, Brigitte Oetker.
WALTHER KONIG/JAHRBUCH FUR MODERNE KUNST
ISBN: 9783865601759 | US $48.00
Pub Date: 12/15/2007
Out of print | Not available

YANG SHAOBIN: CHINESE ARTISTS OF TODAY
Text by Pi Li.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9787543459670 | US $90.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2008
Out of Print | Not available

WANG PENG
Essays by Carol Lu, Pi Li, Yinghua Lu and Adele Tan.
BLUE KINGFISHER
ISBN: 9789889868086 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 8/15/2006
Out of print | Not available

MAHJONG: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART FROM THE SIGG COLLECTION
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775716130 | US $80.00
Pub Date: 8/15/2005
Out of Print | Not available

Pi Li

Caochangdi, Beijing Inside Out

Farmers, Floaters, Taxi Drivers, Artists, and the International Art Mob Challenge and Remake the City

Text by Mary-Ann Ray, Pi Li, Robert E. Mangurian, Darien Williams.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

This study of Caochangdi, one of more than 300 urban villages in the city of Beijing, tells a story about itself and its 4,000-7,000 mostly illegal residents. Caochangdi contains the problems and possibilities of new urban space at a time when cities house 50 percent of the world's population.

In Production Mode, Contemporary Art in China

Chinese Contemporary Art Awards 2008

Edited by Pi Li. Text by Pauline J. Yao, Chris Dercon, Ken Lum, Ruth Noack.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

Accompanying the sixth annual Contemporary Chinese Art Awards exhibition, this catalogue offers images and texts on works by Liu Wei (outstanding artist), Tseng Yu-Chin (outstanding young artist) and Ai Weiwei (lifetime contribution). It is bundled with a monograph by Pauline J. Yao, recipient of the CCAA award for independent art criticism.

Liu Wei: 2006-2007

Edited by Waling Boers. Text by Pi Li, Philip Tinari, Gao Shiming.
Published by Blue Kingfisher/Boers-Li Gallery

This volume tracks the evolution of young Beijing-based artist Liu Wei as he enters the second decade of his career. Works include a model cityscape made of oxhide, a collection of exercise equipment inside a steel cage and an atrium built of old doors and windows.

Touching the Stones

China Art Now

Edited by Waling Boers, Pi Li, Brigitte Oetker.
Published by Walther Konig/Jahrbuch Fur Moderne Kunst

In a 2007 article in The New York Times, David Barboza wrote about recent record-breaking auctions of Chinese art, "With auction prices soaring, hundreds of new studios, galleries and private art museums are opening in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai…Western galleries, especially in Europe, are rushing to sign up unknown painters; artists a year out of college are selling photographic works for as much as $10,000 each; well-known painters have yearlong waiting lists; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris are considering opening branches in China." This fifty-third issue of the respected Cologne-based, English-language art journal Jahresring is an in-depth study of what's happening in Chinese art today, as well as a penetrating look at where the new trends and ideas have come from, and where the market stands. With equal emphasis on images and text, this essential survey features artists such as Ai Weiwei, Big Tail Elephant Group, Cai Guoqiang, Huang Yongping, Sze Tsung Leong, Qui Zhijie, Xu Bing, Xu Tan, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong and Zhang Xiaogang, among many others, and includes critical texts by international art world luminaries like Thomas Bayrle, Jonathan Monk, Christian Jankowski, Erik van Lieshout, Mark Siemons, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stephanie Tasch and Philip Tinari.

Yang Shaobin: Chinese Artists of Today

Text by Pi Li.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

Born in 1963 in Hebei Province, China, Yang Shaobin makes realistic figurative paintings that often disintegrate into Francis Bacon-esque Surrealism. An untitled work from 2007, for example, depicts a man's head floating disembodied on a large dried-blood-colored canvas. The top of the man's head is rendered realistically, but the bottom half of his face is obfuscated by expressionistic whirls of paint. "DNA" (2005), however, is a Social Realist-style tableaux of historical figures arranged in front of a bright blue sky. Though he began his career as a realist, Yang began experimenting with this present hybrid of realism and abstraction in 1998. Critic Sebastian Preuss has written of Yang's style: "His deep pictorial pathos impressively contradicts Neo-Pop, which predominates in all Western countries..." This oversized, slipcased volume is a survey of the highlights of his work to date, and includes an essay by critic Pi Li.

Liu Xiaodong: Painting From Life

Text by Ai Weiwei, Pi Li.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

This volume is the most comprehensive look at Beijing-based painter Liu Xiaodong, who was born in 1963, to date. Articles, interviews and essays are accompanied by high quality, fold-out reproductions of his most significant pieces in this beautifully-designed volume. As the title suggests, Liu paints from life--drawing from the rich history of the practice in Chinese art. Eschewing any sense of romanticism about his subjects, Liu approaches his fusion of landscape painting and portraiture pragmatically. "Eighteen Soldiers Between Mainland and Taiwan" (2004), for example, is a horizontal painting segmented into eight sections, each of which contains a full-body portrait of a soldier staring impassively at the viewer or into the distance; each stands against a different background: a horizon of sea and sky, tanks and bunkers, trees and barbed wire. Included are texts by artist Ai Weiwei and curator Pi Li.

Wei Qingji

Edited by Lin Dong, Lin Nan. Text by Chen Tong, Pi Li, Fan Di-An, Pi Daojian, Wei Qingji. Interview by Gou Xiaoyan.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

Beijing-based Wei Qingji resuscitates the centuries-old practice of ink and wash painting. His graphic style flies in the face of any questions about the relevance of this venerable Chinese tradition, while managing to obliquely address contemporary social concerns. This volume contains over 100 images and an essay by critic Pi Li, among others.

Ji Dachun

Text by Bernhard Fibicher, Ah Cheng, Zhao Li, Pi Li.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

Painter Ji Dachun's poetic use of pencil, ink and white space has always resonated with traditional Chinese portrait painting. But the satirical content of his work remains as contemporary as it is compelling--whether taking on Picasso, Duchamp or the male anatomy. In this beautifully designed, beautifully printed monograph, each work takes as its inspiration a well-known tale, popular advertisement or television commercial upon which the artist transposes his own ironic take. With subversive wit, Ji Dachun examines the complex rapport between the East and the West, infusing his paintings with a grotesque sense of humor and a serendipitous sensibility. Keeping with the precedent of his earliest paintings, esoteric compositions of lines and amorphous forms heavily influenced by the American artist Cy Twombly, Ji Dachun here works with pencil and gouache to create finely detailed images with a bite. A sophisticated and delightful gift book, as well as a serious study.

China Onward The Estella Collection: Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006

By Britta Erickson. Contributions by Hou Hanru, Martina Köppel-Yang, Pi Li, Lotte Philipsen. Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner.
Published by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

This monumental volume highlights the esteemed Estella Collection of contemporary Chinese art, with works spanning from 1966-2006. At more than 450 pages, and standing more than 13 inches tall by 10 inches wide, it features an abundant supply of lavish full-spread images and remarkable details of work by virtually every major contemporary Chinese artist to have contributed to the pivotal, revolutionary moment that has lasted from the 1970s until today. Some of the contributing artists include Wang Keping, Huang Rui, Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Jin, Feng Zhengjie, Wenda Gu, Huang Yong Ping, Rong Rong and Inri, Su-en Wong, Xu Bing, Yue Minjun and Zhang Huan. The breadth of work collected within the covers of this catalogue is so far unrivalled in quality and range. With impeccable scholarship for specialists as well as a lucid and accessible introduction for the wider public.

Xu Yong: Backdrops and Backdrops

Edited by He Hao. Interviews by Britta Erickson, Pi Li.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

The work that first brought the contemporary Chinese photographer Xu Yong to the attention of the international art world was 101 Hutong Portraits, a book-length collection of traditional Beijing street scenes. In Backdrop, Xu Yong collects two bodies of "souvenir" photographs--one taken in Tiananmen Square and the other in front of Shanghai's super-modern Oriental Pearl Tower. Because of the way that Xu Yong lights and frames his photographs, at first glance one can hardly tell if the cultural landmark in the background of each picture is an actual architectural monument or a backdrop screen from a commercial photography studio. Indeed the settings are real. And the people that this rising star captures--including children, teenagers, young sweethearts, married couples, mothers and sons, middle-aged tourists, multi-generational families and groups--offer riveting psychological and sociological studies of modern Chinese culture. Often enigmatic, they have a rare, magnetic pull that keeps you looking.

Wang Peng

Essays by Carol Lu, Pi Li, Yinghua Lu and Adele Tan.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

For his 1993 Wall, Wang Peng built a solid brick barrier at a gallery entrance. This, the one and only piece of work in the show, put him in the midst of China's tense cultural and political atmosphere, and the gallerist, under pressure, asked him to remove it a day later. Wang Peng, who was born in the 1960s, migrated to the States in the mid-90s, but returned to China again in 2000. His performance-based happenings have included locking his audience in an exhibition space without warning and taking up residence in a pavilion by the moat of the Forbidden City in Beijing. His photographs have featured images of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Chairman Mao as well as Tiananmen Square. Here, in response to the figurative tyranny of the scientific method, he's fragmented male and female nudes, inserting slivers of each into test tubes lit from behind, and lined them up on the walls of the exhibition space, preserved and showcased as samples in a lab.

Wang Gongxin & Lin Tianmiao: Here? Or There?

Edited by He Hao. Essays by Britta Erickson and Pi Li.
Published by Blue Kingfisher

Here? Or There? is the lucky culmination of many factors, a happy illustration of structural changes in the development of contemporary art in China after 2000. Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao's cooperation evolved from a common interest in the body and in landscape: Lin Tianmiao's complex patchworks of body parts and other apparatuses turned out to be a perfect match for Wang Gongxin's video work, which brings the bodies and apparatuses alive, makes them appear on the street, in a wasteland, and in the changing, disappearing urban landscape. Here (or Here or There) the body and landscape share a context and virtuosic representation.

Zheng Guogu

Edited by Jean Marc Decrop. Essays by Hu Fang, Gutierrez & Portefaix and Pi Li.
Published by Map Book Publishers

Zheng Guogu belongs to a generation of Chinese artists who grew up with Coca-Cola, Kung Fu movies, pop music, and video games--a generation different from the one that came of age in the uncertainty of the Cultural Revolution of the 70s, and the optimistic utopia of the 80s. It shows. Zheng has produced an astounding heavily conceptual, multimedia oeuvre that includes staged and composite photographs, digitally manipulated Japanese porn films, scribbled ink paintings, photo-collages on rice paper, installations of toys and model motorcycles, performances, and cast-iron Coke bottle sculptures. This book maps out the different aspects of Zheng's work, at the center of which is urbanism and the influence of the media in a country known for its traditional values. Featured are Zheng's prolific paintings, photographs, video installations, architecture, and calligraphy*all influenced by the artist's iconoclastic and innovative slant.

Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art From The Sigg Collection

Edited by Bernard Fibicher. Essays by Ai Weiwei, Feng Boyi, Matthias Frehner, Christoph Heinrich, Hou Hanru, Li Xianting, Pi Li, Uli Sigg and Berhard Fibicher.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

China is booming! In the wake of economic liberalization, the nation's art scene has taken flight as well. The Swiss collector Uli Sigg, formerly his country's ambassador to Beijing, has followed the rapid pace of development since the 1980s, compiling along the way the world's largest collection of contemporary Chinese art, comprising more than 1,200 works by some 180 artists. Mahjong, named after the popular and ancient Chinese game of chance, presents more than 200 paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, video pieces and installations from Sigg's collection. Alongside them hang such curiosities as vintage Mao posters. In addition to a number of internationally famous works, such as Ai Weiwei's Han vase with Coca-Cola logo, Fang Lijun's bald heads or Xu Bing's “Xinglish” calligraphy, this book also offers readers a unique opportunity to discover tremendously gifted artists still largely unknown outside China.