For Yang, running a small business was a big change from being a fine artist showing in museums and galleries. 'As a painter, you work by yourself. Nobody else can participate. But when you operate a silkscreen studio, you form a community,' she says. The studio, A&Y, now works with big names such as Liu Ye, known for his cartoon-like Mondrian-inspired portraits, and cynical realist Yue Minjun, whose big, laughing faces are now iconic in the contemporary Chinese art world.

A&Y does something common in the more developed western art market, but rare in mainland China: they create handmade silkscreen reproductions of paintings, bridging the gap between expensive originals and cheap reproductions. For example, a large oil by an internationally known Chinese painter can go for $100,000. One of A&Y's prints might cost $8,000. This allows the average art buyer to have a handmade painting, authenticated and signed by the artist, for a fraction of the full price.

One reason hand silkscreening hasn't taken off the way one might expect in booming China is because of the time and expense needed to create one print. 'For the first two years, nobody believed we could survive,' says Yang. 'There were two or three other studios that tried to do handmade silkscreen prints and went bankrupt. There was no market for these prints, and they took so much work, time and money to produce.'

It doesn't help that Yang insists on using only top materials - silk from Switzerland, handmade Arches 88 paper from France and paints from New Zealand - as well as doing every part of the process manually.

First, the silkscreener sketches out a painting's various coloured layers. (If a painting is of a red cup on a brown table against a blue background, there might be three layers: one red, one brown, one blue.) The artisan draws each image on a separate transparent plate, which is then laid on a light table that illuminates the image from below. They then lay a silk screen on top of the plate, and roll a thin layer of paint over the silk screen, transferring the image onto paper. This is done for each colour, until the various layers form the desired image.

Of course, most paintings are more complicated than a cup on a table. Yang's most challenging job was Xie Dongming's Country Living, an intricate portrait of an old Chinese farmer that required 100 layers of colour. Every slightly different skin tone in the man's every crease and wrinkle had to be done individually. And Wei Dong's Gentlemen on Clouds, which Yang has hanging in her living room, took 84 layers. Yang points to a light blue vein showing through the skin on one man's leg. 'It took four of us, working every day from 10am to 7pm, two months to do this series. I worked with Wei together to choose the perfect shade for the skin.'

The process also means that A&Y create prints very slowly. In a large drawer at home, Yang has prints from 50 paintings from 20 artists - the total output of six years of work. 'Of course, we could do this by machine, but we don't. It will look cheap. The handmade prints are better. Essentially, they are handmade paintings,' says Yang. 'And it's important that we have the artists involved in the process. When we are done, we have the artist sign each piece that pleases him, so you know that each reproduction is true enough that even the artist himself is happy with it.'

Yang admits that, for now, running such a studio is not the quickest way to earn money - and her suddenly affluent artist friends have criticised her for not taking better advantage of the Chinese art market boom.

'People ask me, 'Why aren't you promoting your own art instead? Then you can make money',' she says. 'Other people mocked us for how seriously we took it. They said, 'Why do you need three different layers of dark purple? Why not combine it into one? It will save time and money.' But that's not the point of our art.'

So far, A&Y's buyers are mostly from overseas. The company has sales representatives in Taiwan, Singapore, Europe and the US. 'Sometimes, prints are sold on consignment through commercial galleries in China, but not that often,' Yang says.

'I want to create a Chinese market for these prints. I want to make art affordable for everyone and I want younger artists to start getting used to the idea of high-quality prints. There's a growing number of art buyers in China - mostly young, educated people with some exposure to foreign culture. China's art market will be huge someday, like America's.'