Chen Yishi
Lineage & School of Heritage
Chen Yishi was born into a family of craftsmen specializing in the woodblock printing of ancient books. From the age of thirteen he learned the craft from his father, fully receiving his father's authentic transmission.
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Male, of Han ethnicity, born in 1947, a native of Yangzhou, Jiangsu. He is a national representative bearer of the Engraved Block Printing Technique, a first-batch national intangible cultural heritage project; he is also a senior arts-and-crafts artist and a Master of Arts and Crafts of Jiangsu Province. Together with decades of diligent practice, his skill is profound and his technique consummate and fluent; he carves with ease in all the script styles, namely zhen (regular script), cao (cursive script), li (clerical script), and zhuan (seal script), and is especially adept at Song-style and Kai-style typefaces. His Song-style carved blocks have sharply defined strokes, each character standing upright on the block, and the books printed from them are clear, beautiful, and elegant, combining the neat solemnity of Northern Song editions, the vigorous roundness of Southern Song editions, and the soft charm of Yuan editions. His artistic style is uniquely his own and is highly esteemed by his peers. Woodblocks he participated in carving include Baiyin Chanshi Zibi Keben Jicheng (Collected Woodblock Editions in the Zen Master Hakuin's Own Hand) and Litang Daoting Lu (Hearsay Records of Litang); movable types he carved include Tangshi Sanbai Shou (Three Hundred Tang Poems), Sunzi Bingfa (The Art of War), and Mao Zedong Shici Qishiliu Shou (Seventy-Six Poems of Mao Zedong). Chen Yishi's block-carving technique has already been passed on to his daughter.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
Profile
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript. Compiled from official national representative bearer archival records, organized by topic and translated into English. 阅读中文版。