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Exhibition Review: Chinese Prints at the Ashmolean

by Griselda Murray Brown
The Ashmolean’s latest exhibition will not satisfy the Sunday afternoon escapist’s desire for a display of Oriental beauty or delicate depictions of distant Chinese rice fields. After wandering past the Renaissance frieze compositions, past the winking jewels in glass cases, the exhibition of late twentieth century and contemporary Chinese prints feels immediately ‘modern’, uncomfortably relevant. The prints are political: each image responds, overtly or obliquely, to the massive economic and cultural upheavals experienced by the Chinese people from the outset of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

 Chinese artisans began practicing print-making over a millennium ago – the output of printed books and illustrations being particularly high during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) – and continue to choose this medium to express today’s issues. There is a continuity of basic ‘effect’ then, but not of content.  Religious images have been replaced by exercises in Communist propaganda, portraits of revolutionary female campaigners, and supposedly apolitical townscapes, to cite just a few from this collection.

‘Golden Sea’ (1972), by Zhao Xicomo, portrays a group of school graduates sent to the countryside to work the land during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), under Mao’s call to ‘receive re-education from the poor and lower middle peasants’. The group of young labourers smile, somewhat exaggeratedly, as they work. It is disturbingly reminiscent of an unsophisticated, 1950s toothpaste advertisement. According to the curators’ blurb, ‘schematic smiling is a typical symbol of that period’; ‘schematic’ says it all. Xicomo was one of the graduates sent out, though his portrayal is an idealised, propagandist one.  Such labourers’ terrible hardship (there was widespread rural famine) is more accurately portrayed in Chao Mei’s ‘First Track of Footprints’, an image of the labourers in the snow, walking against a bitter wind.

 Another of Chao Mei’s prints, ‘September in the North’ (1963), depicts agricultural labourers harvesting the sorghum, during Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward (1958-63). Two thirds of the print are composed of long sorghum stalks in the foreground, and the tiny figures bending round the bottom of the stalks provide a sense of their scale. The print is dominated by a striking red, with occasional blocks of yellow; primary colours are in keeping with the simple definition of the woodcut print.

 The period after the Cultural Revolution has been described as the ‘spring of arts and literature’. Li Xiu’s ‘The Return of the Graduate’ (1977) shows the influences of the Cultural Revolution (most noticeably, the ‘schematic’ smiling), yet has a fresh sense of hope. Three students alight from the train looking expectantly at figures beyond us, extending the pictorial space. Li Xiu was one of a tiny minority of female printmakers, and her print was one of the most published in 1970s China.
The most striking twenty-first century print in the exhibition is Hong Tao’s ‘Galloping Rhythm’ (2000). It depicts a modern train travelling at high speed, its shapes and colours blurred into horizontal streaks of colour. The effect is one of vibrant dynamism, suggestive of China’s rapid economic growth.
The exhibition, though small, showcases a variety of printing techniques, from fine etching to bolder woodblock methods. It shows the print in its simplest monochrome form, as well as its most exuberant. In terms of content, the prints are genuinely thought-provoking. The exhibition comes in two installments, the next one next term: watch this space…

  Part 1: until 9 December 2007

  Part 2: 18 December – 24 January 2008

 

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