In November last year, the "Shangshan Ruoshui - Exhibition of Chen Yuqiang's Printmaking Works" was launched at the Zhejiang Art Museum. Chen Yuqiang was my graduate supervisor, and began to guide me in the creation of silkscreen prints in 1998, at that time I did not know about screen prints, nor did I know his contribution to Chinese screen prints, only that he was usually gentle and elegant, and he was the head of my silk screen studio. He retired after taking me to the school, and I stayed at the school to teach and have been teaching and creating screen prints ever since.
Mr. Chen is a low-key person and never boasts about himself in front of his students, so it was not until many years later that his important role in the art of Chinese screen printmaking became clear in my heart: Mr. Chen Yuqiang is one of the creators of Chinese screen printmaking, and he is the first to create a unique watermark screen print in China and even the world.
In 1981, a print "Zebra" was published in the Fuchunjiang Pictorial. This work is a square monochrome black and white painting, dominated by black and white stripes, in the middle of the stripes hides a zebra that looks back down, the picture distinguishes different shapes through the direction of the inherent color stripes of the object, rather than through the difference between light and shade, which is a bit similar to the card that detects color blindness, which needs to be completed by the "optical illusion" of the person, and a large number of missing visual information needs to be automatically filled by our brains. This method of modeling was uncommon in both Western and Eastern traditional painting until the emergence of Gestalt theory in the West and its extensive use in "op art" after the 1960s. This small black-and-white print with avant-garde effect is one of the earliest silkscreen prints in China created by Chen Yuqiang in 1980.
Chen Yuqiang Youtan Watermark Woodcut 47.5×37 .6cm
Before the 1980s, screen prints in China have been in a blank state, but the real sense of "screen printing" in the 40s to 70s has been used in industrial uses, known as "silk paint printing" and "thick paint printing", etc., used to print propaganda posters, posters and other paper products, flags, armbands and other fabrics, as well as radio glass panels, greeting cards, mirrors and other materials on the text and patterns. In the late 1970s, with the development of reform and opening up, various Western art trends were once again introduced to China, and the concept and books on "silkscreen printmaking" began to enter the mainland.
Chen Yuqiang Nanping Evening Clock Watermark Screen 51×69cm, 2002
Chen Yuqiang Three Pools Yingyue Watermark Screen 51×69cm, 2001
Chen Yuqiang Mountain color empty rain yiqi watermark screen 51×69cm, 2004
Guang Jun of the Central Academy of Fine Arts created a silkscreen print "Autumn You Are Early!" in 1979. At the same time, at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, Chen Yuqiang was the first to realize the importance of developing silkscreen printmaking, and began to study the techniques and principles of this edition in 1979, and successfully created the earliest silkscreen printmaking work in mainland China the following year, such as "Zebra", and published the earliest papers on the theory of silkscreen printmaking such as "Introduction to Silkscreen Printmaking". In 1983, with the support of the Department of Printmaking, Mr. Chen founded the Silkscreen Printmaking Studio. He found a batch of screen printing equipment used to copy peasant paintings in Huxian County in the late 1960s from the "West Lake Art Garden" (former watermark factory) of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, and made his own screen printing equipment such as printing tables, scrapers, photosensitive adhesives, and defiling fluid; then he successfully experimented with the photographic platemaking technology in screen printmaking; in 1984, the screen printmaking studio opened classes to students, and in 1985, the screen printmaking technique course was officially incorporated into the syllabus of the Department of Printmaking. Under the joint promotion of CAFA and Gome, silkscreen printmaking was rapidly promoted in art academies across the country, and together with woodblock prints, copperplate prints and lithographs, they were called "wood, copper, stone and silk" four major prints.
Chen Yuqiang Good jasmine watermark screen 69×51cm, 2003
Chen Yuqiang LiRenxing Watermark Screen 69×51cm, 2003
In 1984, a print with a unique ink charm, "West Lake Night", was published in the "Printmaking Art" of that year, representing the official appearance of "watermark screen prints". The work depicts the West Lake under the moonlit night, and the tree pen and ink painted by the splash ink method in the foreground are dripping and in one breath, showing a different charm from the watermark woodcut. Traditional Chinese engraving and printing with watermarking has a long history, but modern watermark woodcuts only began to develop in the 1950s. In addition to the unique taste of knives, wood and printing of woodcuts, watermark woodcuts also have a unique "ink charm" because of their water-based printing methods, which have strong national characteristics. In 1954, Zhang Yangxi created the first watermark woodcut work "New Arrival Pictorial" since the establishment of the Printmaking Department of the China Academy of Fine Arts, which opened the prelude to the creation and teaching of watermark printmaking. "Creation should be based on typical examples of life, and the means of expression should integrate traditional Chinese art with Western techniques", which is the guiding ideology of the creation of new Chinese printmaking initiated by Zhang Yangxi. Under the guidance of this idea, "the rhyme of watermark" has become another important goal of the construction of woodcut language under the direction of national folk, and has grown into an important academic vein of the printmaking department.
Chen Yuqiang Hanxue Watermark Screen 45×37cm, 1997
Chen Yuqiang, Sprinkling Watermark Screen, 63×50cm, 1998
Watermark woodcuts accounted for a large proportion of Chen Yuqiang's works between 1956 and 1980, and at the same time as he founded a screen print studio in the early 1980s, he began to explore the technique of transplanting watermark woodcuts into silkscreen prints. In the series of works that have since expressed "heron birds", the characteristics of watermark screen prints have been fully exerted and have become the classic pattern of watermark screen prints. In "Comb" created in 1999, the "black and white gray" of the picture is properly distributed, and the gray water pattern is expressed by the unique texture in the silk screen gelatin film technique, making full use of various "accidentalities" to make the water pattern appear natural and flexible. The white space and the infiltration of the edges in the painting properly represent the fluffy and white feathers of the heron bird, and the woodcut thick ink lines of "Jinjian" outline the eyes, mouth, feet and other details to complete the "finishing touch". In this batch of works, the traditional Chinese rice paper and ink are perfectly combined with the modern screen printing technology imported from the West, and integrated into their own understanding of Chinese painting and watermark printmaking, and successfully establish a "watermark screen print" with "Chinese spirit" that is different from the Western model.
Chen Yuqiang Comb Watermark Screen 63×50cm, 1999
Chen Yuqiang Fly watermark screen 45×37cm, 1998
Chen Yuqiang Gui Watermark Screen 63×50cm, 1999
Teacher Chen's paintings are like his people, fully embodying the characteristics of "indifference", and his artistic style is very appropriate to describe it as the second-ranked "dilution" in Tang Ren Situ Kong's "Twenty-Four Poems", and the first sentence of the "dilution" chapter is "to be silent, and the magic is subtle." This means that in a state of silence and inaction, we can appreciate the subtleties of nature. His works, whether woodcuts or silkscreen prints, generally present this "diluted" quality, flushed but not thin, light and flavorful, and "virtual things" in my understanding is the most important character in the creation of "contemporary printmaking".