Surprises from China

Published : Dec 17, 2004 00:00 IST

Rage, China. Woodprint, 1935. Li Hua. - COURTESY: THE EMBASSY OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Rage, China. Woodprint, 1935. Li Hua. - COURTESY: THE EMBASSY OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

The 2000-year-old Chinese art of print-making has evolved into a fine art form, absorbing and reflecting the ideas of different ages in Chinese history.

THE art of the print-maker has emotive beginnings in the history of primitive man who left his mark on many a cave by just stamping on it a palm dipped in ochre. Over millennia, when we look at these handprints, we sense the immediacy of the experience and its spontaneity that gives it the quality of expression. But as with all human activity, it transforms itself and its meaning with the development of technology and also of expressive qualities that are original.

The handprint became the block-print, the wood-cut, the lino-cut, the lithograph printed from a stone slab, the etching from copper, the screen-print of silk, monoprints of glass-sheets, intaglio prints and the gypsograph. Obviously, this enormous technical range would not have been applied to this type of art object had it not proved its validity over centuries. In fact, the print reflects the most personal form of mass contact available in society. It speaks from hand to hand. And it is societies with an advanced form of civilisation that respond to it and help it proliferate.

So, the week-long exhibition of selected Chinese prints of the 20th century at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi was looked forward to, as China reflects the combination of an old culture and the world's most robust economy presenting a progressive outlook and polity in contemporary terms. So, both its continuing interest in print-making, and its mastery over this technique was something to look out for.

China has an old history of print-making going back some 2,000 years. Prints were in mass circulation from the Tang dynasty (618-907). It developed a full repertoire during the Song (960-1207) and Yuan (1206-1368) dynasties. And it developed to its height during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). This process of proliferation and development continued under the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), but in its last years, the introduction of new techniques in printing pushed the wood-cut with its highly personalised tactile qualities into the background. But it is precisely because of these that it became the favoured vehicle of new ideas. It could reach out to many at the same time; yet each print with its hand-cut surface had a special impact.

In this exhibition, we see a number of distinct periods of Chinese print-making. Not surprisingly, they are related to the various stages of the Chinese revolution. A turn-of-the-century print of the Shanghai Railway Station from Souzhou brings the railway into the picture, looming in the background of the print, in sharp contrast to the rickshaw and the horse-drawn coach. One is reminded of how Karl Marx saw the capacity of this technology to create a revolutionary situation in a traditional society. The print is an atelier-produced work and, in all probability, the cutting of the wood and colouring was done by different people. But it is obvious that the impact of the new technology was not lost on any of them. Similarly, a scene of Sichuan from a Wuquiang wood-cut contrasts a tram with a rickshaw, a bicycle and a man on horseback. Electric wires criss-cross the street. The call for a change is everywhere.

Changes, however, do not happen on their own. They have to be worked for and brought about in action. This brings us to the period of the maturing of the Chinese revolution from 1930-1949. It required enormous feats of both organisation and consciousness. The traditional atelier system gave way to the individual artist creating and finishing his own work independently. This was an art of individual empowerment whose impact was to be a mass one. It is interesting that this "new print" movement was started by Lu Xun, the most important litterateur of the Chinese revolution. With Maxim Gorki and Munshi Premchand, he is one of the great figures of world literature.

TO the Indian eye, this period is the most engrossing. Not only does it cover the ups and downs of crisis-ridden society, with hunger, helplessness, poverty, atrocities, mass displacements, and of course, rage and resistance. The Indian art lover will relate to these prints most easily because they represent many similarities in our two societies' past. The savagery of a dying feudal and colonial order and the resistance of the people are something the Chinese and Indian people share. That is why these prints are also stylistically similar to our own prints of Bengal of the same period, notably those of our great printmaker, Chittaprasad Bhattacharya.

Among the most expressive works of this period in this exhibition `Rage', a 1935 woodcut by Li Hua stands out as it visually links an individual's arm reaching out to the enemy, with a crowd of individuals on the horizon, merging the individual with the collective and, with the horizon represented as an arc, with the world. To be able to represent the world and the place of an individual in it so simply is a mark of genius. To me this represents one of the best examples of the `new print' trend inspired by Lu Xun.

Other works that stood out among those in this genre and which were outstanding, were Li Pingfan's `Hunger' (1939), Lin Yanzheng's `In a Holy Church' (1942), Wang Renfeng's `Boat Trackers on the Jialing River' (1943), Cai Dizhi's `Evacuation of Giulin' (1945), Shao Keping's `In the Street' (1947), `The Indignant People' by Yeng Nexiong (1948) and `Burning the Land Contract' by Gu Yuan (1947). I found this section fascinating because of its simple and direct approach to reality and its subject matter that reminded me of our wood-cut makers of the 1940s and 1950s from Bengal.

From the 1950s on, after the success of the Chinese revolution, we see the proliferation of themes, especially those about the new people of new times. A work that is extremely well conceived is Li Huanmin's `Studying' (1958), which shows a herdsman studying in the pastures. One can sense the hunger for new ideas gripping a newly liberated people with an unprecedented passion to catch up with events in fast-changing times. Another work that communicates the sense of power people felt in the first flush of revolution is powerfully brought out in Su Kuang and A Ge's worker with a pick-axe in his hand, entitled `Destiny in our Grasp' (1978). The most striking thing about the artistic expression of this period is its optimism and the confidence with which artists take on new themes, and new situations in which people find themselves, as also the new concept of what is the subject matter of art.

This spirit permeates Chinese art to this day. This is evident from works like Wang Shenghong's woodprint, the `Spirit of Steel (V)' of 1998, Ziag Guilin's `Wall Series (VIII)' (1993), `A Silver World' by Chen Yanlong (1994) and `Waking of the City' by Ju Jirong (1993).

The important thing to note is that the art of socialist countries is able to accept and express industrial society far better than the generally alienated art of the capitalist world. Industry in societies such as China serves the people and eases their burdens. Its main feature is not exploitation. And a number of works in this exhibition reflect this reality that we can only appreciate from a distance. For example, Wang Shengdong integrates steel-workers and furnaces in a manner inconceivable in a capitalist society as the worker is virtually consumed in the process of production. One has only to see the different condition of health of retired workers in a socialist state and a capitalist one to appreciate the difference. As in life, so in art, this exhibition from China has much we can learn from.

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