So, exhibition of the week was The Printed Image in China from 8th-21st Centuries at the British Museum. It feels like I have been to so many shows at the British Museum over the last few months; I think it’s because there have quite good, FREE, prints and drawing exhibitions upstairs which are the perfect size i.e. about 2 or 3 rooms. I made this particular visit with the delightful Nathanial after a very pleasant all you could eat vegetarian curry lunch in Euston. Nat is one of those people who spends about 10 minutes running around an exhibition and is then done and therefore I felt I too had to rush around which is another reason I remember barely anything about it. I will forgive him though as he is clearly rather busy being affianced at the moment. Also it provides me with a good excuse for having a rubbish addled memory.
So prints and drawings; it’s funny really as it occurred to me at the end of this show that the development of printing in different cultures around the world always seems to fit roughly the same pattern: Printing of some kind was invented/introduced, a few people practised it as a fine art, it was taken over by the kitsch and produced for everyday populist consumption, therefore disregarded by everyone and considered unworthy of study or appreciation, the 19th century comes along and everyone decides that low brow prints from various cultures are in fact fab and decide to herald them as new artistic wanders, some sort of revolution, political unrest, war etc comes along and they are used either as state propaganda or by radicals of various leanings to undermine and criticise said state propaganda/rule, then later in the 20th century everyone rediscovers said printing process in some sort of ‘back to peasantry’ ideal and they are once again viewed as artistic and worthy creations. Now admittedly I don’t know much about printing but what I do know seems to ALWAYS fit with this pattern – ALWAYS. There is nothing wrong with that obviously but it can make for quite a formulaic exhibition experience sometime.
China is a good place to start when looking at prints because, obviously being about 2000 years more advanced than us at that time they invented the fucking thing. RATHER impressively, therefore, the BM (which has apparently “one of the most comprehensive collections of Chinese prints outside Asia”) has been loaned a Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra by the British Library, dating from 868 AD which is the world’s earliest dated printed book!! Pretty impressive you have to admit!! Although it’s not the earliest example of a printed but only the oldest we have bearing a date. By the time it was made, block-printing had been practiced in the Far East for more than a century.
You can look at it online on one of those ‘page turning’ websites here:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/diamondsutra.html
Otherwise here is a pic:
It’s a 5 metre-long scroll and was made from 5 carved woodblocks and was hidden for hundreds of years in a cave in north-west China and not discovered until 1907! Very excitingly the cave was deliberately sealed and hidden at a time when that part of China was at threat but it contained a library of 40, 000 books and manuscripts and was part of a complex known as the Caves of a Thousand Buddha’s – v exciting sounding can you image discovering that?!?! Anyway not only is it the world oldest printed book but it is also, apparently, the most important sacred work of the Buddhist faith. The illustration at the beginning shows the Buddha expounding the sutra to an elderly disciple called Subhuti. Towards the end of the sermon, Subhuti asks the Buddha how the sutra should be known. He is told to call it ‘The Diamond of Transcendent Wisdom’ because its teaching will cut like a diamond blade through worldly illusion to illuminate what is real and everlasting. The relatively short ‘Diamond Sutra’ was popular because it could be memorised more easily than longer sutras and chanted in some 40 minutes. This was important because Buddhism teaches that recitation of sutras ‘gains merit’, that is, helps towards achieving a higher incarnation.
Ok I don’t know anything about Buddhism but apparently one of the teachings is that you earn lots of bonus Karma points (or however it works) by reproducing Buddhist teachings and images which have everyone a really good reason to develop printing techniques and explains the invention, development popularity and circulation of prints in China.
Other earlier stuff they had included some really beautiful flower prints which were skillfully crafted to appear like finely painted images:
They also had a lot of later prints depicting flowers which was a popular subject matter across several centuries. This was due to flowers being important and sophisticated visual symbols, much like in the west. Examples of flower imagery includes Flowers and Incense, Ding Liangxian from 1720-50. Good old cut and paste job starts here: [The print illustrates] different good wishes which are expressed through a complex combination of symbols. The wish for peace, prosperity and riches in the accompanying verse is echoed by the bronze vessels. The two components of the word for bronze give the meaning 'gold-like' and as objects of antiquity they are regarded as valuable. The word for vase, ping, is a homophone for peace. The vase here is decorated with divinatory trigrams for fire and thunder. It contains peonies, a representation of spring, and orchids which allude to the fragrance of wealth referred to in the verse, as does the burning of incense, xiang. The word for bat, fu, is a homophone for happiness, while the wisps of smoke emerging from the incense-burner has curled into shapes of the lingzhi fungus, the symbol of longevity. Other symbols of spring, like the water narcissus and camellia, suggest that this print was probably used during the Chinese New Year.
Other flower imagery included Flower Basket (c.1690) by Ding Jinchang. All very pretty.
The exhibition then moved on to later prints. Due to the increasingly urban population of China printing became a staple of the middle classes and increasingly commercial and decidedly kitsch. One of the most popular forms of commercial prints at this time were door guards which were used to hang outside peoples homes to bring good luck, fortune, or health etc. Different door guards were used for different festivals and for different wishes. Popular imagery included warriors and children, in particular boys (obviously).
Alas I couldn’t find an image of the truly hideous little boy images they had on display but here is a print produced for the merchant classes with a similar subject matter called ‘One Hundred Children’. It demonstrated the influence of western painting traditions in the perspective and architecture and shows the need for images appropriate to the ever expanding merchant class during this period:
Western influence can also be seen in the emerging fashion for copperplate prints and their use by people such as the Qianlong emperor who used western artistic fashions to have huge paintings made to document his East Turkestan campaign. These were then reproduced as small scale line drawings and then sent to Paris to be engraved by Jacques-Philippe Le Bas and then shipped back to China. This technique was so popular that over subsequent campaigns copperplate engraving was mastered by Chinese printers and produced entirely in China. Images such as The Lifting of the Siege of the Black River Camp (1771) show westernised traditions of history painting along with the modelling of portraits and landscapes:
There was a whole section on prints used as propaganda during the various devastating Chinese political and social upheavals as well as (surprise surprise) its rediscovery and revaluation sometime in the 20th century but god I cant remember much about that.Instead for me the stuff that stood out by far the most were the 20th century and contemporary print sections. Images such as Artificial Wonderland by Yang Yongliang are totally beautiful playing on the Chinese printing tradition:
Chatting over Tea by Wu Jide’s from 1984 is stunning:
Morning on the Huangpu River by Shao Keping from 1962 shows china as an emerging industrial power:
Anyway it was lovely lovely and very much enjoyed – Ciao xx
