Fifty Years of Chinese Woodblock Prints: Art for the People

Wednesday January 26, 2000 - Friday March 10, 2000
Fifty Years of Chinese Woodblock Prints: Art for the People

Huang Dan (artist) & Shen Yungsheng (engraver), Guilin nianhua workshop, Long Live the People's Republic of China, 1950

This touring exhibition was on view at the DAC and the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies. The Museum of Art Ein Harod organized the exhibition, which was curated by Chang Tsong-zung & associate curators Iris Wachs and Yan Shancun.

The exhibition gave a rare overview of post-1945 woodcuts. These propaganda pieces, dramatic landscapes, and intense psychological portraits are renowned for their technical virtuosity and often poignant emotional content, but have been largely unknown to the American public.

woodcut woodcut

Huang Peimo, In Praise of the Red Flag, 1972;
A Distant Source and a Long Stream, 1973

woodcut

Highly creative and stylistically diverse, these prints exhibit influences from early European modernism to Soviet-style socialist realism.

Zhao Yannian
Nightmare:
Number One

(self-portrait),
1989

The exhibition's other venues included Marquette University's Haggerty Museum of Art; the University of Pittsburgh's University Art Gallery; the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; and a collaborative double venue at the Daura Gallery of Lynchburg College and the Pannell Gallery of Sweet Briar College.

Patrick Dowdey, curator of the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, gave a gallery talk at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday 3 February 2000 at the DAC.