This
article by Li Shu Sheng first appeared in Chinese
Printmaking, issue no. 5, June 1994, p~. 3-4.
It not only records a significant time in the
development of printmaking in China, including the
background to the making of China 's first
screenprint but has much to say that will seem
familiar to those of us who worked through the period
of the change over to water-soluble materials in
screenprinting.
Contemporary
printmaking in China started in the 1930s, but due to
the restrictive conditions of the time, priority was
given to the woodcut. The Fine Art Department of Lu Xun 1 Academy
of Fine Arts in the Yan An 2 of the war period more or less became a
department of woodcut printing. It is clear that not
only did printmaking give priority to the woodcut
but, as a consequence of the lack of progress in the
con-ditions for the many other kinds of artists at
the time, every-body who came to work there made
woodcuts.
After
the founding of New China 3, the
situation changed out of all proportion. Oil
painting, traditional Chinese painting, watercolour
painting and gouache painting all under-went massive
developments. Not only was printing established in
the academies as a specialist area of study but, as
well as woodcut printing workshops, lithography and
intaglio workshops were starting to be set up. The
fundamental tech-niques of making prints are Western
in form: planographic printing, intaglio printing,
relief printing and stencil printing. Lithography
belongs to planographic printing, etching belongs to
intaglio printing, and the woodcut belongs to relief
printing; only stencil printing remained for a long
time without a proper category. In the period
1979-1980 the elderly printmaker Li Hua, then
responsible for the teaching of the Chinese Central Academy of
Fine Arts
4 Printmaking
Department's research students, invited his fellow
townsman Zheng Ke from the Chinese Central Arts and
Crafts Institute to teach the research class.
Zheng Ke had studied
in France during the 1930s; after returning to China
he took up a teaching post at Guang Zhou 5 City Art
School, becoming a colleague of Li Hua. At that time
Li Hua was organising exhibitions of contemporary
prints, and publishing about 18 issues of the
magazine ‘Contemporary Prints.’
The majority of the
organisation and design of these 18 issues became the
responsibility of Zheng Ke. Almost 40 years later,
the two elderly professors came together again to
teach. On this occasion Zheng Ke, at the same time as
he was teaching drawing to the printmaking research
students, was bringing in books dealing with the
making of screenprints and introduced the particular
qualities and working methods of screenprinting.
This was the start of
the introduction of screenprinting into the Central
Academy.
Guang Jun, while a
research student in the Printmaking Department,
became interested in screenprinting and in 1979 he
began to experiment with screenprinting at home,
frequently making enquiries at printing and dyeing
mills, asking for advice from printers of garments,
skilled crafts-men in workshops making coloured flags
and making his own comparatively simple screenprints.
During this time he was submitting research reports
to Li Hua. In 1980, among the pieces of work
submitted for his post-graduate degree, Guang Jun
included his experimental screenprint ‘Hello
to Autumn’; this work was China's
first screenprint.
In April 1981, Li Hua,
Hu Yi Quan and Li Xi Qin formed themselves into a
Fine Art delegation to visit the United-Kingdom. The
visitors observed and studied Fine Art educa-tion in
the UK, giving Li Hua the determination to establish
a screenprinting workshop and begin an energetic
promotion of its use, tasks he set about immediately
on his return. He instructed Zhang Gui Lin to raise
money to buy equipment and to go around every
screenprinting factory in the Bei Jing, printing
technology institute to ask for advice and gain some
practical experience. At the same time, the Central
Academy graduate Zhao Rui Chun was to be temporarily
transferred to Bei Jing to be given joint
responsibility for the creation of the new workshop.
In 1981, Li Hua and
other like-minded senior print- makers initiated the
holding of the first national Three
Printmaking Techniques Exhibition of
etchings, lithographs and screenprints, in the
exhibition hall of the Central Academy. The
exhibition was organised jointly by the Central
Academy, Guang Zhou Academy of Fine Arts and the Zhe Jiang Academy of Fine
Arts 6. It
contained 268 works of which 117 were etchings, 95
were lithographs, yet only 28 were screenprints.
After the Three
Printmaking Techniques Exhibition had
been shown in Bei Jing, various institutions around
the country looked to Bei Jing 7 to convene informal meetings and discussion
groups, following which the exhibition toured to Zhe Jiang, Guang Dong, Si
Chuan, Ji Lin 8 and other places. The exhibition was of
tremendous value in giving impetus to the development
of different types of printmaking, particularly to
the flourishing medium of screenprinting. Since 1981
when Li Hua had formally proposed that a
screenprinting workshop be established, three years
had passed in making preparations and in the work of
preparing the teaching programme; it was not until
late 1983 that screenprinting began to have an
increasing role in undergraduate classes. Zhang Jun
was among the earliest students to attempt to adopt
the qualities of screenprinting: he had completed his
under- graduate work in 1982, work that was all in
the new medium. In May 1983, as a way of opening up
screenprinting ,
Shan Dong 9 Museum of Fine Art conducted a study class,
attended by 30 persons and invited Guang Jun and
Zhang Gui Lin, lecturers at the Central Academy, to
come to Shan Dong to lecture.
On the 27 October
1984, as well as the second Three
Printmaking Techniques Exhibition
opening in Hang
Zhou 10, the
Three Printmaking Techniques Research Group was
formed. As part of its initiatives in every area of
activity, the Printmaking Department of the Central
Academy formally established the screenprinting
workshop in 1985. Now screenprinting and woodcut
printing, lithography, etching and illustration could
stand side by side in the five work-shops; this was
the beginning of the teaching of screenprint-ing as a
specialist subject in fine art institutions
nation-wide. In order that the craft of
screenprinting might be popularised and its creative
use might flourish, from 1986 onwards -the Central
Academy started to train the teaching staff of
various fraternal institutions. Printmakers from He
Bei, Si Chuan, Tian Jin, Guang Dong, Ji Lin, Shaan Xi 11 and so on, came to the Central Academy for
advanced studies. The workshop teachers made use of
the holiday periods to go to Shan Dong and Ning Xia 12 to hold classes, to lecture; going deep
into the countryside to give impetus to the
development and use of screenprinting across the
nation. Yet everything provides its own headaches.
The generation of screenprint artists who established
the first screenprinting workshop also created
exquisite screenprints.
‘Beloved’
by Zhao Rui Chun, ‘The war horse
hesitates’ and ‘A
drawing of picking lotus flowers’
by Guang Jun, ‘Morning light’
and ‘Ancient China’
a set of ten works by Zhang Gui Lin, ‘A
dozen New Year cakes’ and ‘Dancing
lions’ by Zhang Jun, were all in
the footprints of the pioneers. Another of the myriad
aspects is the sacrifices they all made, paying an
extremely high price. It has come to be said just how
disgusting, crude and simple the working conditions
in this first screenprinting workshop were: one that
was both without skylights or ventilation equipment,
with a water supply that was barely adequate for a 12
square metre workshop and where the smell of all
kinds of volatile materials made it difficult for
people to breathe. The air pollution and the
pollution of the running water eventually caused a
large tree growing in front of the work-shop to die.
Already subjected to a
Department that paid scant atten-tion to warnings of
bad maintenance and monitoring, and a work load that
often caused classes to be suspended, the teachers
were brought close to the point of sealing the doors.
The lack of realisation of the seriousness of the
toxic and pollutive nature of the materials used in
making screenprints together with their love of the
cause of printmaking allowed these printmakers to
disregard the awfulness of their envi-ronment. They
were still not in the least bit negative in the
workshop, working around the clock and, in spite of
the poisonous pollution, able to solve a great many
technical problems. Finally tempered by their
difficulties, they were to emerge with their own
individual styles. The value of their indomitable
struggle and selfless dedication to the pioneer-ing
spirit is beyond praise. Still the knowledge of
contem-porary scientific techniques was inadequate
and the lack of awareness of the toxic nature of the
materials had to be overcome. This was also a
valuable lesson to bear in mind. These aspects of the
situation are hard to imagine when one is admiring
the beauty of screenprints.
During the course of
the workshop's continuing striving for improvement,
Guang Jun went to France in 1987 to study the Fine
Arts. When he returned home he brought with him
complete information of the organisation of foreign
work-shops to provide the Academy's Printmaking
Department Screenprinting Workshop with a basis for
consultation. It was only in 1988 that the workshop
expanded the work area. Thanks to the progress of
printing technology in China it was already possible
to manufacture a non-toxic diazo photosensitive
emulsion; this gave a new impetus to the development
of printmaking in the country and satisfied the
workshop's increasing measures to exclude pollutants.
During the making of prints, experiments started with
non-poisonous and non-pollutant materials actively to
improve the work-shop conditions.
Screenprinting has
accomplished the making of a new kind of picture;
there are important reasons for these devel-opments.
The first is its suitability for contemporary needs:
screenprinting techniques reflect the contemporary
development of scientific techniques. They allow the
use of photography, photo-sensitive materials,
photocopies of real objects, many kinds of cut
stencil techniques; one can also achieve meticulous
and authentic effects in pictures by artifi-cial
means that one could not possibly draw, satisfying
the people's new demand to appreciate beautiful
things. Screenprinting is also able to make use of
the possibilities of print-ing of colour fades,
gradual changes, overlappings etc., many of the ways
of making beautiful prints and attaining fascinat-ing
artistic charm. Screenprinting is also capable of a
range of sizes and of being printed on materials of
different quali-ties, it is able to utilise many
kinds of material and is also able to adapt to
different kinds of textures, thereby expanding the
medium of printing.
The second reason is
that in accomplishing the art of the screenprint, the
printmakers in the Academy's screenprint-ing workshop
grasped the true spirit of work, much to the credit
of individuals. Since being able to control
screenprint-ing techniques, they had simultaneously
solved the big problem of a 'Chinese' quality for
screenprints. They were not copying or imitating
styles from abroad; on the contrary they dedicatedly
created a Chinese style of art that a Chinese
audi-ence loved to see, a Chinese way of seeing
things. The printmakers drew nourishment from the
deep emotion and artistic expression within Chinese
traditional painting, choosing rural themes, using
life as their starting point. ‘King
of the clocks’ and ‘Spirit
Road’ by Zhang Gui Lin, ‘Bei
Jing’ by Zhou Ji Rong, all
silently transmit the profound feelings of the
nation. Guang Jun has undertaken a long search for
the interest and charm of the scholars13 paintings; their use of gorgeous, lucid and
lively colour, succinct descriptive models from a
multitude of artistic forms call for deep thought.
The consequence of their hard work was that this new
art form very quickly came to stand like a giant in
China's art and liter-ary circles, taking root in the
fertile field that is the life of the nation.
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