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Old-style woodcuts find modern audience
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FOR many people, especially the young, New Year’s paintings are pretty clichéd. Rustic themes expressed in scenes drawn from history and mythology extend wishes for good luck, prosperity, longevity or posterity.
An exhibition at the Suzhou Art Museum is upending that concept. Entitled “Record of Suzhou’s Glory — Suzhou Taohuawu Woodcut Prints Exhibition,” it features 13 rarely seen Gusu engravings of New Year’s prints. Gusu is the ancient name of Suzhou.
Taohuawu woodcut prints, which originated in Suzhou, feature delicate engravings, bright colors and varied themes that express not only good wishes but also social issues, folk customs and environmental changes in the Wu region.
It’s said that Taohuawu woodcut prints are a portrayal of the changes and development of Suzhou.
The exhibition, which took three years of preparation, includes about 90 Suzhou Taohuawu woodcut prints. The 13 precious Gusu engravings are on loan from the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Kobe, Japan, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and China’s Liaoning Provincial Museum. It is the first such exhibition of Gusu engravings in China.
According to Zhang Qing, curator of the exhibition, Suzhou Taohuawu woodcut prints came into being as a form of folk art in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and enjoyed great popularity in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).
“The period from the reign of Emperor Kangxi to Emperor Qianlong is the heyday of Taohuawu woodcut prints, known as Gusu engraving,” Zhang explains. “The prints mainly describe the lives of Suzhou residents and depict urban landscapes.
“They were influenced by Western techniques. The artistic language, a combination of Jiangsu and Anhui engraving and copperplate wiring methods, constituted a magnificent chapter in Chinese fine arts history,” he adds. “Gusu engraving represented the peak of artistic ideology.”
The highlight of the exhibition is “Fishermen, Woodcutters, Farmers and Scholars,” on loan from Kobe. The work depicts common people, such as woodcutters, boatmen, children playing, old fishermen and some daily scenes like weaving and dining.
Visitors are amazed by the superb technique in woodcarving and color processing. Layers of subtlety in hues and intricate carving lines create details that seem born of something beyond woodblocks.
“Sometimes even I wonder how these details could be matched so accurately and perfectly, block after block,” Zhang says.
Taohuawu woodcut prints express the temperament of scholars. In some works centered on women, ladies read books, play the zither and write poetry. “Woodblock painting is the hardcore of traditional printing techniques,” Zhang says. “The decline of folk New Year’s paintings, including Taohuawu woodcut prints, resulted from advances in printing techniques and photography, together with the development of science and culture as well as changes of social structure.”
Today, Gusu engraving is hardly found in China. Zhang invited a group of experts in this genre to a seminar, and some of them were viewing these precious engravings up close for the first time.
“It is a shame that some of the woodblocks were just thrown out and left to rot,” says Bo Songnian, 84, a top China art critic. “As far as I know, museums in Japan today have collections of 300 pieces of Gusu engravings. Thanks to this Suzhou exhibition, the value of Taohuawu woodcut prints can be appreciated by a wider audience.”
For curator Zhang, his emotional link with Taohuawu prints goes deeper.
“In 1990, I saw a Kayama Matazo film at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing,” he recalls. “At the end of the show, Matazo talked about the influence that Japanese ukiyo-e exerted on French post-Impressionist art. Hearing that, I immediately stood up and expressed my desire to hold a Suzhou Taohaowu woodcut prints exhibition someday to show people the origin of the artistic ideas of Japanese ukiyo-e. Why? Because the origins were in Taohuawu woodcut prints.”
Trading ships from Suzhou carried the art form to the ports of Japan. Ukiyo-e, which translates as “pictures of the floating world,” is a genre that flourished in Japan from the 17th -19th centuries.
Through the support of China’s National Art Fund Projects and with the cooperation from museums, art galleries and libraries around the world where Suzhou Taohuawu woodcut prints are preserved, the exhibition in Suzhou is a milestone
“Taohaowu woodcut prints are a gem among Suzhou cultural treasures,” says Cao Jun, chief curator of the Suzhou Art Museum and director at Suzhou Municipal Center of Public Culture. “The genre is listed as national intangible cultural heritage. Our center has a collection of over 400 ancient New Year’s paintings dating back to the late Qing Dynasty, and some of them are in this exhibition.”
The Taohuawu woodcut prints are divided into different sections, encompassing Buddha, Taoism and immortals, happiness and kindness, auspiciousness and temperament, Chinese opera and folklore, and scenic spots.
“For the Gusu engravings, the museum had special display boxes made, with constant temperature and humidity,” Cao says. “We feel so proud that we are finally able to bring them back to China for a reunion for the first time.”
“The Record of Suzhou’s Glory — Suzhou Taohuawu Woodcut Prints Exhibition”
Date: Through December 15, 9am-5pm
Venue: Suzhou Art Museum, 2075 Renmin Rd, Pingjiang District, Suzhou
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