Japanese and Chinese prints display cultural evolution

Two exhibitions of prints offer a window into the cultural evolution of China and Japan.

Diving (1932) by Onchi Knshiro; Lu Xun (1974) by Li Yitai.

Many people still have difficulty understanding the specific nature of printmaking as an art form, which is perhaps not entirely surprising given the range of media and techniques employed, from relief procedures such as woodblock to intaglio ones like engraving and etching, with all its variations (aquatint, mezzotint and so on), and then methods that are neither intaglio nor relief such as lithograph, monoprint or even silkscreen.

Confusion is particularly acute about what constitutes an original print. On the one hand people may not understand how a multiple can be an original, and on the other hand they wonder why a commercially produced copy is simply a reproduction. As I was visiting the Chinese prints exhibition at the University of Sydney, in fact, a gentleman came in with his family and on the way out inquired whether these were “originals” or — even more oddly — copies by the university’s students.

The short answer to such questions is that commercial reproductions are mechanically produced and all identical, whereas what are called original prints are individually hand-made, each one requiring a high degree of skill and none completely identical.

Nonetheless, the undeniable ambiguities about the status of prints, the fact they are multiples and in some forms can serve as illustrations in books, that they can exist — except where limited by the conventions of modern fine-art prints — in a number of variations or states and an indefinite number of copies, all serve to make them particularly flexible as a ­vehicle for social observation and commentary.

These two exhibitions, one of Chinese prints from the postwar years at the University of Sydney and the other of Japanese prints from the pre-war period at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, both offer fascinating windows into the rapidly evolving societies within which they were produced. In each case, the social and cultural transformations are registered not only in content but also in the media used and the styles adopted.

The case of modern Japanese printmaking is particularly complex, for the ukiyo-e tradition that flourished in the later 18th and the 19th centuries was itself the product of earlier contact with Europe. The Japanese assimilated Western conventions of perspective and turned them into the powerful two-dimensional patterns that so appealed to early Western modernism. They also employed new synthetic colours such as ultramarine, imported from the West even during the period when Japan was almost wholly cut off from the rest of the world.

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japan began an astonishingly rapid period of modernisation and Westernisation, printmaking once again opens itself to modern European influences. The work produced during the next half-century ranges from a continuation of the refined traditions of earlier ukiyo-e, including poetic landscapes, or quiet and introspective images of courtesans applying makeup or brushing their hair, to seemingly wholesale adoption of modern Western vision.

There are thus images that adopt a naturalistic and in some cases almost photographic angle of vision, although even in these cases the colour woodblock medium, with its black contours and areas of flat colour, endows these images with a degree of artifice and stylisation. Other prints, especially by artists who travelled in Europe, emulate the effects of impressionism, neo-impressionism and post-impressionism.

The two main tendencies within modern Japanese woodblock prints were known as shin-hanga (new prints) and sosaku-hanga (creative prints); the first of these is considered more traditional, while the second, which began in 1904 with Yamamoto Kanae’s Fisherman, was more overtly modernist and westernising. Fisherman, indeed, is clearly an East-West hybrid whose use of tonality recalls 16th-century chiaroscuro woodcuts.

In practice, the two tendencies are not always easy to distinguish, especially as they almost all continue to use the medium of woodblock. Many of the sosaku-hanga group carved their own blocks instead of leaving this to specialists, which tended to give their work a rougher, more naive or expressionistic quality, but others chose to employ specialist cutters on the grounds that the cutting was reproduction, not original creation.

Among the more modernist pictures are many that bring to life the new urban world of Japan; several record the devastating 1923 Tokyo earthquake that obliterated the capital. But by now Japan’s economic momentum was so powerful the whole city was rebuilt in modern style within less than a decade, and a number of works, extremely interesting in content if less so in style, reflect the brash new world of a self-consciously Western boom economy.

The most beautiful prints in an outstanding exhibition (accompanied by a particularly beautiful catalogue), those of most enduring aesthetic appeal, are not surprisingly ones that balance the exquisite refinement of the tradition with subtly new subjects or angles of ­vision. One such work is Uehara Konen’s Dotonbori (c. 1928), a nocturne in which we look through the black silhouette of a bare wintry tree, across a river or canal, to a modern building in muted grey, its windows lit by the new electric lighting.

The aesthetic is profoundly Japanese, but the subject, the visual experience, is a significantly new one, drawn from the modern city. And the overall effect is surprisingly akin to that of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph of the Flat­iron building in New York (1904), itself an attempt to imbue photography with an aesthetic sensibility derived from Whistler, who had in turn ultimately learned it from the ukiyo-e woodblocks of Japan.

The exhibition of Chinese prints at the University of Sydney, drawn from its own collection, is much smaller but also fascinating in the way it offers us glimpses of the changing social and ideological world within which these images were made. For these were the years of the establishment of Maoist communism, then the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), progress towards relative liberalisation, a new wave of restrictions after Tiananmen Square, and then the remarkable transformation of China in an explosion of capitalist activity more or less controlled by the state and exploited by the ruling Communist Party.

This exhibition too is accompanied by an excellent catalogue that covers the full collection (almost twice as many prints again), explains its genesis, and contains much valuable research on the individual printmakers, many of whom may be unfamiliar and who are, as one of the contributors suggests, different from the kind of artists who have risen to prominence in the contemporary art market. Given the complex and politically murky history of these years, it is helpful to have expert guidance in approaching some of these works.

Nonetheless, some things are inherently striking, like the contrast between the first two images we encounter on the right as we enter, a landscape and a portrait separated by two decades. The first is fine woodcut by Zhao Zongzao, a view of a river with small figures of workers on the bank and a town on the far side. It is entirely European in style, and the only thing it has in common with the great tradition of Chinese painting is its monochromy. Revolutionary art is staunchly Western in media and formal idiom, no doubt because of the influence of Soviet social realism and the association of classic Chinese art with an aristocratic cultural tradition.

And yet this picture is not revolutionary in any overt sense; the little toiling figures in the foreground hardly detain our attention, which is mainly drawn to the radiant light on the water, an effect achieved through the control of degrees of darkness all around. In contrast, the portrait of well-known author Lu Xun by Li Yitai from the last years of the Cultural Revolution is effective but rather brutal in the way the figure is starkly profiled against the blank whiteness of the paper behind. The picture on the wall is a print by Kaethe Kollwitz, implying that the official style of socialist realism is a continuation of Kollwitz’s approach.

Other works are still more explicitly political, such as the two 1961 woodcuts by Zhao Zongzao — whose approach seems to have changed dramatically only a few years after the river landscape just described. Both are titled Scenes from the Northwest; one shows a group of workers clambering up a steep slope towards what appears to be a hilltop city, and the other has a cloudburst of light streaming down over a railway station. Both woodblocks are brutally and coarsely cut in a style that recalls German expressionism, although in a more literal and illustrative mode.

These two works date from the period of the Great Leap Forward, another disastrous Maoist initiative that started in 1958. Still more didactic is a work from just before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution: Cheng Mian’s Evening Examination (1961) shows one of the so-called “barefoot doctors” — peasants with rudimentary paramedical training — administering medicine to a poor woman’s child.

It is a graphic, easily legible image of essentially propagandistic intent in broad areas of black and white, but its intimacy makes it far more engaging than the bombastic coloured posters of workers and peasants from the same period; and the motif of the open umbrella on the lower left relieves the pedestrian realism with an entirely gratuitous decorative touch that makes one think of Margaret Preston or even Thea Proctor.

Among the more complex works in the exhibition are those of Su Xinping, born in 1961 to a family of Han Chinese officials in the ethnically distinct region of Inner Mongolia, whose landscape made an enduring impression on him. The earlier works in the exhibition, such as Going to school (1984) or Morning (1985), draw on the highly simplified forms of German expressionist woodblock to make a kind of folk art about the lives of ordinary people.

During the 1990s, his paintings and prints deplore the growing materialism and corruption of China. The collection includes a print not in the exhibition but reproduced in the book, in which party officials and the new capitalist entrepreneurs — as their costumes would imply — raise glasses of wine over a table laden with roast suckling pig and goose.

The end wall of the exhibition is dominated by a colossal woodblock print by the same artist, Homeland (2002), mounted on a scroll. The choice is significant, because the subject of the print is a mountainous landscape inspired by the classic Chinese ink paintings that are traditionally displayed as scrolls. In this case however, the mountainscape is dominated by a massive and lowering face, gazing at us balefully between the peaks. We are given no hints as to the identity of the figure, but there is no ­mistaking the sense of menace hanging over a scene that evokes at once the heart of the ­Chinese land and the spirit of Chinese traditional culture.

Floating time: Chinese prints 1954-2002

University of Sydney Gallery. Until November.

Japan: Modern — Elise Wessels Collection

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Until September 11.