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The Modern Woodcut Movement in China

A talk by Julia Andrews, Ohio State University - Presented by the UCLA Department of Art History

Friday, February 10, 2006
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
275 Dodd Hall
UCLA

Illustration: Hu Yichuan, To the Front (1932)

The woodblock print, often called by the Japanese term "creative woodcut," began its twentieth century renaissance in China as an art of modernist experimentation, with varied styles and subjects. Political subject matter, although frequent, was only one theme among many competing areas of concern for the young artists. Modernist angst, formalist experimentation, technical experiments with color and light, lyrical landscapes and domestic scenes, and creative ideas of all sorts filled the exhibitions and publications of the fledgling print movement. How, then, in the time between its inception in 1931 and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, was the woodblock transformed into the genre by which it is best commemorated today, the art of the revolution?

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Professor Andrews is the Director of the East Asian Studies Center. She is a specialist in Chinese painting and modern Chinese art. Her first book, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China (1994), won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book of the year on modern China. More recently, she served as co-curator and catalogue author (with OSU alumnus Kuiyi Shen) of the Guggenheim Museum's 1998 exhibition A Century in Crisis : Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China, which was shown in New York and Bilbao. She has recently contributed to several exhibition catalogues and anthologies, including Between the Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium Wars to the Cultural Revolution, 1840-1979 (Asian Art Museum of San Francisco) and Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists (Buffalo: State University of New York at Buffalo, Research Center in Art + Culture, 2000). She teaches undergraduate courses on Chinese and Japanese art and topically organized graduate seminars that usually focus on Chinese painting or modern Chinese art. Her graduate students have written theses on topics in Chinese or Japanese art of the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.

Sponsor(s): Art History Department