The emerging woodblock printmaking movement in China was initiated by Mr. Lu Xun in Shanghai, who painstakingly collected prints from Europe and Japan, and introduced the works of outstanding European printmakers such as Kollwitz and Meferd to China. Yesterday, the exhibition "Imagination and Reality: The Late Qing Empire in Nineteenth-Century European Copperplate Engravings" opened in the special exhibition hall of the Lu Xun Memorial Hall in Shanghai, showing 90 copperplate engravings from Thomas Arom's 1843 collection of Thomas Arom's copperplate engravings published in the Ningbo China Port Museum, "China: Landscapes, Architecture and Social Customs of that Ancient Empire". The exhibition runs until 5 April.
Pictured: The exhibition site
From the 17th to the 19th century, Europe set off a "Chinese cultural fever", Europeans were fascinated by this oriental country, thinkers such as Voltaire praised China's highest morality, aristocrats competed to chase Chinese art, and merchants were full of yearning for China's wealth.
Against this backdrop, the famous British architect and painter Thomas Allrom created a set of watercolors depicting Chinese scenes, which were made and published in 1843 by the Fisher Company in London. The contents of the prints cover everything, from the ingenious royal palaces to the exquisite and elegant ancient towns in the south, from the profligate dignitaries to the ordinary people who live a difficult life, from the busy and lively production activities to the sincere and pious worship scenes, from the quiet and serene harbor scenery to the tense and fierce war scenes, all of which are depicted by Arom's delicate brushstrokes. As soon as the album was published, it was highly sought after, and Europeans who had never been to China hoped to truly understand this ancient oriental country through this album. Unfortunately, Arom himself has never been to China, and half of his China comes from the "authentic" sketches of painters who have traveled to China, and half from his own, or the collective imagination of Europeans, of China.
Pictured: The Great Wall of China
In this exhibition, the Shanghai Lu Xun Memorial Hall presents nine European copperplate engraving books related to Lu Xun, including the copperplate engravings of the famous French printmaker, sculptor and illustrator Gustav Doré in the 19th century. Doré has illustrated copperplate engravings for the Rabelais Anthology, the Bible, the Divine Comedy, etc., and this exhibition is also a concentrated display of Dolly's copperplate engraving illustrations.
As an artistic expression, printmaking is highly respected by Lu Xun for its strong appeal of content expression. Lu Xun believed that the works of European printmakers were "worthy of study by art students and art lovers", which promoted the vigorous development of the emerging woodcut movement in China at that time. Holding this exhibition is also a kind of review and inheritance of Lu Xun's vigorous promotion of the emerging woodcut movement. (Xinmin Evening News reporter Xu Yisheng)
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Copperplate engravings are different from woodblock prints, which are prints made of metal materials, mostly copper, and printed. When making plates, the author uses metal engraving knives or acidic liquid corrosion to engrave the copper plate layout with the required pattern. When printing, first coat the layout with ink, so that all the concave lines are filled with ink, remove the ink other than the concave line and place it on the copper plate machine to emboze, and after the paper is pressed, the ink in the concave line is adsorbed and then formed a raised line. Because the concave lines have thickness, depth and density, and the amount of ink attached is different, the copperplate engraving is more layered and the tone change is more complex, which can show a very delicate picture effect.