Exhibition period: May 16th to May 24th, 2017

Exhibition location: Hall C and Hall C on the first floor of Shenzhen Guan Shanyue Art Museum

Organizers: Shenzhen Guan Shanyue Art Museum and Heilongjiang Provincial Art Museum

Opening time: 3:00 PM on May 16, 2017

     Among various painting genres, printmaking is an art style presented in the form of "transfer" and "plural". Due to the origin of printmaking in printing, it has possessed unique artistic attributes that differ from other forms of art since its inception. It is precisely because of this uniqueness that printmaking amplifies the aesthetic and social functions of artistic works, and has gained public recognition beyond race and population in the process of social dissemination.

Since the 1940s and 1950s, Heilongjiang has undergone more than half a century of collective printmaking creation and dissemination, forming a unique school of printmaking creation in the history of Chinese art, with Beidahuang printmaking as the starting point and mainstream. The Heilongjiang Provincial Art Museum is based on a collection of works with clear academic positioning and considerable scale, based on local cultural ecology and artistic resources, with printmaking as the main direction and characteristic positioning of the collection. On the basis of collecting classic works and artistic literature from contemporary printmakers in Heilongjiang and China, our museum has gradually expanded its scope, breaking through the limitations of time and region, and expanding its horizons to include representative printmaking works from Chinese folk printmaking and even Eastern and Western countries. We have expanded the variety and style of printmaking collections and continuously enriched the resources of our printmaking collection. Exploring the local and exotic printmaking styles has become the focus and development trend of our museum's collection.

This exhibition covers representative, inheritable, systematic, and related samples of Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings in Shaanxi, China, Japanese ukiyo-e prints, and Italian Carlo copperplate prints. These samples run through the 17th to 19th centuries in time and span across Asia and Europe in space. The opportunity created by the collection behavior of Heilongjiang Provincial Art Museum based on its academic positioning has allowed three different cultural attributes of printmaking works to come together, giving colleagues from all walks of life the opportunity to "see through the East and West". Through printmaking from different eras, regions, and with vastly different styles, empirical evidence is preserved, observing and comparing the historical trajectory, ethnic characteristics, language characteristics, and culture reflected in them. The aesthetic significance and cultural value of the essence and experiential characteristics of printmaking.

    For this reason, the Heilongjiang Provincial Art Museum has specially invited renowned scholars from domestic art schools to sort out and analyze the different printmaking styles in this exhibition, in order to provide us with a deeper and more thorough perspective on the origins and differences of printmaking art between the East and the West.

    This exhibition has been awarded the honor of Excellent Exhibition Project in the 2016 National Art Museum Collection Exhibition Season organized by the Ministry of Culture. The project tour plan has received strong support from colleagues at the Guan Shanyue Art Museum in Shenzhen. We express our sincere gratitude and are very willing to share this excellent project with the audience in Shenzhen.