May 10th 2013

We’re all very excited here at Eyestorm about the new Jacky Tsai print editions, titled Vermilion Garden and Vermilion Light. We’ve been working on them with Jacky and the guys at Jealous print studio for a few months now, but our enthusiasm for their launch was heightened a couple of weeks ago when we sold out of the Soul Harvest edition in its entirety during AAF New York and started showing images of the new pieces in progress, which I’d snapped on my phone a couple of weeks beforehand. There was such a buzz around Jacky and the skull prints, it was fantastic.

So in terms of the new prints, as with Soul Harvest and Golden Harvest, we’ve created two separate editions that work alongside each other as a pair, but are different in many ways. Vermilion Garden sees Jacky’s iconic skull image printed boldly in vermilion red (often referred to as ‘Chinese red’) placed onto a shimmering silver ink background. The white in the skull is slightly creamier this time, complimenting the other tones. It’s visually beautiful, in an edition of 50 at an affordable £720.

Its sister print Vermilion Light takes things to the next level as Jacky introduces 3D skull imagery in the backdrop that’s delicately covered by sheets of hand-applied palladium leaf. He’s also taken the bird on the right hand side of the skull (as you look at it), as well as a few feather details on the left and a line of flowers towards the mouth, and used extra layers of gold to pick them out, giving the impression of collage, as if they’re sitting on the surface of the paper. The result is as stunning, if not more so, than its predecessor Golden Harvest (which used gold leaf and picked out alternative details from the skull). The pièce de résistance in this print however is not immediately noticeable, not in normal light conditions anyway. The skull imagery actually includes a glow-in-the-dark ink that charges up with either natural or artificial light, so that when the lights are turned off, the skull glows. As one of the only people who have seen the effects of this so far, I can honestly say it looks pretty amazing, and I have to say, in an edition of just 20, I don’t see this edition hanging around for long.

See Vermilion Garden and Vermilion Light in more detail here

I spoke to Jacky about the making of the work and some of his ideas behind his creations. Read the interview here.

Creative Director