“From East to East”
“From East to East” Contemporary Printmaking Art Exchange Exhibition——Thematic Exhibition of 2021 China CEEC Youth Art Festival, was opening on June 11 in the Art Space of Ningbo Beilun Cultural Center.
The idea and concept of the whole project is to show the links between nations and people，different cultures and societies and their cultural ‘threads’ linking and connecting one state to another. This exhibition has the intent to demonstrate the cultural links between Asia and countries from Central and Eastern European region through the Silk Road. There is an invisible way of communication from Central and Eastern European countries to China, which has had a huge impact on the integration of communication between people and cultures, which endorses new ideas.
Through a distinctive use of artistic techniques including printmaking and art installations contemporary artists from different countries and regions from Central and East Europe and China will show their own cultural characteristics and artistic style. All these gathered in this exhibition, become a linkage and map of the world.
The exhibition “From East to East” aims to create a ‘link’ of communication, enabling audiences across nationalities, identities, genders and ages to experience visual aesthetics of colors and images; to feel the connection with each other in the contemporary art world.
The understanding of contemporary printmaking as a production of art is generally constantly being tested, since the boundaries of art are being merged, crossed, blurred and erased in front of our eyes. The history of contemporary printmaking is quite exciting, as it is not long ago that it was considered by artists, theorists and most notably the art market, to be an alchemical discipline reserved for only a select few. Such treatment, linked to the historical origin of printmaking, its relation to traditional printmaking techniques and mastery, was legitimate up till about the 1960s, when it was put into question by the appearance of pop art and photography radicalized traditional autographic approaches to the field the introduction of screen-printing in the production of the printmaking as art.
Printmaking has a distinct and decisive history in the world of art, and has been in existence as a recognizable field of visual art since the fifteenth century. Formerly the Renaissance, prints have enabled artists to disseminate their ideas and works throughout the world, since the capacity of printing to produce multiplied images, established a communication with a wider circle of people.
It is believed that the Chinese may have produced a primitive form of print, called a rubbing, around 105 AD. To aide Chinese scholars in the study of their scriptures, texts and holy images were carved into large, flat stone slabs. After the designs were incised, damp paper was pressed and molded so the paper was held in the incised lines. Ink was applied and paper was removed. White lines appeared on a black background. This technique was the foundation of printing. This method of combining text and image is called block book printing. While the process of screen-printing originated also in China sometime during the Song Dynasty, screen – printing (serigraphy) became a popular medium for Western artists in the nineteenth century. Screen-printing is a technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink which then can be pressed through. A squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. It was introduced as a fine art technique for the first time with an exhibition of serigraphs at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
The artists presented on the show, with the more than one hundred artworks on paper from both China and Central and Eastern Europe too are constantly inquiring about, not only the concepts of artistic creation, but also the characteristics of the techniques, mediums, processes and relations within the art of contemporary printmaking. By focusing on the countries in the Central and Eastern Europe, where printmaking has a distinctive presence, this show is unique. Central and Eastern European cultural space and as a region is extremely heterogeneous, the ethnic roots, for example of Hungarian, Albanian, Romanian, Latvian and Bulgarian cultures have not so much common between. Their languages and cultural traditions do not unite them, but separate from each other and only one thing, one cultural experience unites all Central and East European countries – the experience of local issues, which also differentiates them from the other world. This show also demonstrates alertness to a region that provides examples of art practice which has the capacity to destabilize, or at least prompt re-evaluation of assumptions of the printmaking held in East European countries. It casts the net of research across wider geographical areas than those usually accommodated in contemporary print studies and provides a more complete picture of printmaking as it has evolved since its beginning. To make a print, the artist draws on metal, wood or another material to create an image. This plate or block with the image on it is called the matrix. With the flood of the digital in contemporary art production, however, we are seeing a growing tendency towards a return to the original principles and processes of the printmaking medium. The artists represented all respect fundamental tenets of printmaking and the works shown on exhibition is a reflection on how the developments of media in printmaking have stimulated and changed the artistic practice, offers to viewers the opportunity to discover a lesser-known aspect of the artist’s work – printmaking. The artworks on the exhibition presents everything from screen-prints to lithographs, from woodcuts to four-color prints, from original prints to monoprints, mezzotint, aquatint and linocuts.
Artists selected for the exhibition from these countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. Today, the artists in this exhibition pay more attention on quality, on project orientation, on space between the image and the void, the context and the medial function.
The international exchange printmaking exhibition “From East to East” and various festivals devoted to the contemporary culture are, much more so than fairs, the best place to evaluate the state and pulse within the field of contemporary printmaking, whilst also being a good opportunity for theoretical discourse on art.
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