With Silent Pink, artist Nici Jost presents her second publication dedicated to the color pink — a natural continuation of her long-term artistic investigation into this multifaceted hue.
Pink holds a central place in Jost’s artistic and personal universe. Over the years, she has systematically investigated the color’s cultural, social and historical layers, assembling an ever-growing archive of pink objects and articulating its aesthetic complexity through the development of her Pink Colour System. During a research residency in Shanghai in 2018, Jost deepened her inquiry into the perception, use and linguistic nuances of pink in China, expanding her system with two new shades first conceived in 2016: Peach Pink and Silent Pink.
The publication shows photographic sequences in which collected objects and urban observations enter into precise yet intuitive constellations. Some relationships reveal themselves through tonal proximity; others emerge from the productive friction of seemingly unrelated elements. Pink here becomes a taxonomy — a principle that categorises, indexes, and connects. Between the images, personal reflections by Diyi Mergenthaler and Chinese artist Chongyin Yuan deepen the readers’s understanding of Chinese culture and the reception of pink.
In her contribution A Picture Is Always a Picture of a Picture, Dr. Isabel Balzer reflects on Jost’s research in China and the compositional narrative of this publication — the juxtaposition of image pairs and the introduction of the newly defined hues Silent Pink and Peach Pink — situating these recent additions within the broader framework of Jost’s oeuvre.
The dust jacket, printed in these two new shades, functions simultaneously as a material extension of the Pink Colour System — transforming the book into both document and specimen.
