Each year, the Yishu8 Maison des Arts in Beijing welcomes three French winners of the Yishu8 Contemporary Art Prize – France. This residency is an opportunity for artists to immerse themselves in Chinese culture and nourish their work with new influences. In the reciprocity of these exchanges, Yishu8 also created the Yishu8 Contemporary Art Prize – China and the Golden Phoenix Chinese Craft Prize. The Chinese winners are invited to stay at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris to discover French culture. The exhibition presented at the MNAAG celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Yishu8 Contemporary Art Prize, through a retrospective of young painters, sculptors, visual artists, videographers and photographers.

For 10 years, Yishu8 has been a unique platform for Franco-Chinese creation and influence, whose vocation is to strengthen France-China art relations by giving young French and Chinese artists the opportunity to immerse themselves in their mutual artistic worlds. This place of exchanges and dialogues makes it possible to establish bridges between the Western contemporary spirit and the Chinese tradition.

The Yishu8 prize rewards each year in France and China young French and Chinese talents committed to the path towards the other. Each leaves to discover the country and the traditional culture of the other, in order to immerse themselves in a foreign artistic universe and to draw new inspirations there. It is these paths from one to the other but also from each one towards otherness that the exhibition reflects through a subtle and mysterious walk through the permanent collections of the MNAAG and the Hôtel d'Heidelbach.

Within the rooms of the China collection on the 2nd floor of the permanent exhibition, winners of the Yishu8 Prize were invited to choose an object "in resonance" with their approach, then to write postcards to other artists in which through a few sentences or a pictorial gesture reveals the way in which this object “speaks today” to the artist. These cards are inserted in the showcases of the museum, offering in an allusive mode a poetic attachment to certain objects from the museum collections. It is a memorial gesture that brings together the history of the object and the memory of the artist, an encounter that the Chinese call “yuan fen” and which designates a selective affinity decided by heaven. Thereby,

At the Hôtel d'Heidelbach, it is the warm spirit of the Atelier Yishu8 that is recreated, a place of creation, encounters and conviviality, which welcomes visitors and offers them not only to discover the works of artists of the Yishu8 Prize, but also to experience a Chinese "art of living", through rituals and contemporary performances.