cactuspress.nl

CACTUS PRESS 仙人掌印務部

cactuspressnl@gmail.com
Instagram：@howlingcactus_

A publishing collective formed by three women living between the Netherlands and the Chinese speaking world.

Cactus Press develops a hybrid practice that connects print media, sound, moving image,exhibition-making, and participatory performance. We are drawn to gestures of resistance that grow out of dryness and silence. For us, publishing is an attempt to speak again across different soils—a process of interpenetration and exchange that turns each book into a living hypertext. Each publication becomes a node that links to other forms and contexts, generating new relations that keep the practice open, porous, and alive.

CONTACT

WHAT IS HAPPENING

Uncoming Book Fair

Apr. 17-19 — London
— Outland Publishing Fair

Past Events

2026

Jan. 10-31 — Changsha
— Lailaihuihui
Exhibition：Please Dance Happily and Freely

Jan. 10-11 — Changsha
— Lailaihuihui
Dance Workshop

Jan. 31 — Rotterdam
— Dokhuis Zinefair

2025

Dec. 6 — The Hague
— Nowhere Zine Island

Dec. 6-8 — Bangkok
— Book Fair

Dec. 13 — Utrecht
— FOTODOK × Casco Book Fair

Dec. 18 — Utrecht
— Basecamp

Dec. 19-21 — Tokyo
— Tokyo Art Book Fair

Dec. 28 — Kunming
— Used Good Fair

1. Misplaced Poems, Displaced Poems

This unbound book holds ten poems from different moments of the artist's life, who lived and worked within the South-Asian context. Written over a span of ten years, these small texts respond to the political, cultural, and social climate of her country. As she moved to the Netherlands, she found resonating voices in a community of immigrant artists from many parts of the world. With time, the misplaced, or displaced poems started to make sense in a world where power follows a pattern, and so does the voice of dissent, fraught between memories and erasure. The book offers reflections on silence, and resilience.

Artist: Sarmistha Bose | Designer: Jasper Yi Cao
50 copies | By Cactus Press

2.All the dancer are one family

天下麥舞一家親

This project, initiated by artist Wang Xue Sophia, explores Meshrep (or Maiwu), a form of contemporary Chinese square dance, through field research and archival study.

It includes two publications: The National Meshrep Square Dance Directory, a community-maintained guide listing dance
groups and schedules nationwide, and The Meshrep Score, which traces the transformation of Meshrep from ritual to stage to public square using historical dance materials.

“All the dancer are one family” is a slogan often shared among Meshrep dancer friends, perhaps expresses people’s longing for connection and collective movement.
Cactus Press aims for these publications to act as a sustainable dancing guide, celebrating connection, friendship, and collective movement, while allowing Maiwu to continue generating new relationships and possibilities for shared dance.

Artist: Wang Xue Sophia | Design, Edit: Jasper Yi Cao
First edition: 100 copies | Printed in riso, two colors

3. So Long 一百年太久

The illustrations are transcribed and assembled from take-out tickets generated in the artist’s daily life. The text in the note on the take-out ticket was disassembled from a speech given by Li Ta-chao at Peking University one hundred years ago (January 16, 1923), titled “Economic Organization under Socialism”. The text reached the artist in small quantities, many times, and indirectly through deliverymen with food during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the small tickets were printed using cheap thermal printing, they were mostly torn and faded. One hundred years is too long to wait.

The design of the book is a return to the effect of the magazines that were circulated among the youth groups during the May 4th revolution in China one hundred years ago. The book is printed in two colours by riso and bound with locking wires.

Artist: Yao Meng | Design: Jasper Yi Cao
First edition: 50 copies | Second edition: 50 copies | Printed in riso, two colors

4. Loveletters, Fireworks and Time Travle

情書, 煙花和時間穿梭

"Love Letters, Fireworks, and Time Travel" is a project where the author came across dozens of old love letters exchanged between two individuals.

The letters date back to the late 1990s and narrate the lives of the male and female protagonists as they traveled and worked in various cities in Hunan province, China. The letters capture both mundane daily life events and playful banter between the lovers, evoking a strong emotional response in the author. After reading the letters, the author decided to use them as a template to recreate and experience the depicted life through their own perspective. They embarked on a photography journey, capturing a new set of images reflecting the similar cities and lifestyles but with different protagonists. This project became a resonance across time, providing a unique sense of life experience. After about six months of continuous photography, the author decided to compile the new pictures with the old love letters into a book, creating a fresh and unified love story that blends past and present. From trivial daily records to the state of feelings between lovers, the letters are permeated with emotions and routines, as if everything is reproduced in the author in a different time and space. Words and images are all records, 1996 and 2023 may not be so far away; stagnation or flow, it is all a shuttle, or rather, time is inherently intertwined and infinite imagination. The book is printed in two colors by risograph and bind by thread sewing with a piece of folding page.

Artist:Jasper Yi Cao | Design: Jasper Yi Cao
First edition: 88 copies, Collaborate Publisher:PNPRESS

5. Zine 03 Still Can't Face Left

Zine 03 依然不能朝著左邊

Zine03 Still Can't Face Left is the fourth book in the ‘Howling Cactus‘ zine series, in which the photographers hope to convey poetry through photographs, replacing language with images, where the pictures themselves may be the vocabulary, and where a single photograph constitutes the discourse that ultimately forms the poem. The cover of the book is stamped silver on black tactile paper; relatively rough book paper was chosen to enhance the rough texture of the images and photographs, and a cloth-covered spine was chosen for the lock-wire binding. Inside, the editors have ordered the photographs of the three authors incorrectly in pursuit of a fluent reading experience.

Artist:the Howling Cactus| Design: Jasper Yi Cao
200 copies | By Cactus Press

6. Zine 04
Touch us here, in the wrong place

Zine 04 在錯亂的這裏, 撫摸我們

In our fourth zine, 04: Touch us here, in the wrong place, we experimented with transformation across different materials and media. Glass, fabric, handmade paper, and expired photographic paper became a testing ground for images. Poetry and language drift and weave through the visuals.
This is the final photography zine by the Howling Cactus.

Artist:the Howling Cactus| Design: Jasper Yi Cao
200 copies | By Cactus Press