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Exhibitions
Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints At The British Library
By Kate Morrison
11/12/2003
Photo: Mao and Mother of the Martyr by Jia Lijian Son. © Jia Lijian Son.
Kate Morrison travelled to the capital to see a huge and eclectic show at the British Library.
There was a lot of politics about in the 20th Century. Countries caught fascism and communism like diseases, and the mortality rate shot up.
The first art exhibition ever to be held at the British Library, Chinese Printmaking Today: Woodblock Printing in China 1980 – 2000, on until March 7 2004, is dedicated to an art form still trying to break free of that political legacy.
Chinese woodblock print has a thousand-year old history, but is little known outside China.
Photo: Five Colours, Six Hues by Song Enhou. © Song Enhou.
Curator Anne Farrer, a senior lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, told me: "The exhibition of contemporary Chinese prints has never been covered before in the UK or in Europe. Chinese painting is connected with a scholarly tradition, whereas printmaking was made by artisans so it doesn’t have an inbuilt sense of status - very little research has been done into it."
Woodblock printing was taken up by Chinese communists in the 1930s: its folk connections and popular appeal made it the ideal low-cost medium for transmitting social dogma.
When Chairman Mao became China’s Communist leader in 1949, woodblock was his chosen propaganda instrument. Mao believed that art should serve politics and the masses. Individual creativity was forcibly oppressed.
After Mao’s death in 1976, an art form so closely connected to political oppression had to struggle to find a new identity, balancing ancient tradition with the sudden influx of ideas and materials from the West.
Photo: Dike by Wu Haicheng. © Wu Haicheng.
The large scale of this exhibition (there are over 200 prints by 90 artists) demonstrates the many different paths artists have taken in the search for modern relevance.
There are landscapes, urban nightmares, figure drawings and abstracts, printed in a huge range of styles and techniques.
Some of the most arresting prints are those in which the conflict between history and modernity is clearly visible.
Dike (1998) by Wu Haicheng depicts the young soldiers who helped save Chinese cities from devastating floods in 1998. The subject matter resembles the social-realist prints produced under Mao, recording important political events. But Haicheng is a contemporary artist, using modern techniques to communicate the force and flow of the water exploding over the unyielding soldiers.
Photo: Lazy Cat and Rat by Liu Yuhui. © Liu Yuhui.
Other artists have turned away from politics altogether, instead combining folk tradition and modern Western art.
Guan Weixiao's Strength, Speed and Sentiment (1985) is a tracery of wild, fine lines, from which nomadic horsemen leap. The print looks like batik, but may also have stylistic connections with Jackson Pollock’s paint-drip canvases. Picasso and Kandinsky also appear as influences in some prints.
In trying to create something new from their heritage, some artists are even producing conceptual work.
Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1988) is a series of traditionally bound books, filled with an invented alphabet of meaningless Chinese characters. This 'negation of the cultural authority of the Chinese writing system' is also a response to the confusing flood of new Western ideas.
Photo: The True Story of Ah Q (1) by Zhao Yannian. © Zhao Yannian.
Exhibition designer Karl Abeyasekera has created a sympathetic space for the prints. "This design clearly supports what the artists are trying to do; bring print-making out of tradition into something modern and new in Chinese art," explained Anne Farrer.
Black and white walls reflect the positive and negative nature of woodblock print. The cuts and gouges that form a woodblock picture become walls and screens with slots cut in them, allowing the viewer to see the art from different angles.
The prints alone are startling and beautiful, but the exhibition also provides a crash course in Chinese history, politics and culture. Audio and video footage accompany the prints, leading the viewer through the terrible upheavals of the last century.
Anyone with an interest in China, or indeed 20th century history, should go.
British Library, London
British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB, England
T: 020 7412 7332
Open: Mon, Wed-Fri 0930-1800
Tues 0930-2000
Sat 0930-1700
Sun and English Public Holidays 1100-1700
Closed: 24 - 28 December 2007
1 January 2007
Closing at 17.00 23 and 29 - 31 December 2007
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