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jaeleslie at 02:51pm on 23/11/2003
jaeleslie at 02:51pm on 23/11/2003Every time I go to the British Library, I have asked about their policy on photography, and at the front they tell me, and then at some point when I am happily taking very long exposures in very low light conditions someone comes up to me and tells me I can't take pictures there. I am not understanding the directions very well it seems. But I am accumulating some fine photographs of their collections.
When I went this time, on November 13, there was an exhibit on the poetry of Ted Hughes, some big explanatory displays and some small press stuff in cases. But the big show was a brilliant exhibit of modern Chinese printmaking. I took more notes of more astonishing woodcuts than you would care to hear about.
There were accordion books, and long scrolls, and broadside posters. Somber stuff like An Bin's Floating Corpses printed on brown fiber paper, and Zhao Yannien's The True Story of Ah Q, black images that reminded me of Goya's horrors of war series. Xu Bing had made Book from the Sky, four books handprinted in wood type in which the characters are entirely meaningless. I saw lines of every character, from strong bold rough lines in black, to fine quiet still lines printed in white on gray (Gao Rongsheng's "Forbidden City"). Everything from urban subjects, to portraits of various minority peoples, to evocative natural compositions from the "Great Northern Wastes Artists Association". I loved the color, and their compositional purity, and the fact that there is a Great Northern Wastes Artists Association.
I saw astonishing examples of block printing techniques that I had hardly heard of before, particularly the waste-block process, in which the same block is re-cut and different colors printed in small editions. I loved that there is a Cynical Realism movement.
Out in the lobby, artist Xu Zhongou was printing an enormous scroll from a series of four-foot blocks. The official opening was that very night. The exhibit is there until March 4.
When I went this time, on November 13, there was an exhibit on the poetry of Ted Hughes, some big explanatory displays and some small press stuff in cases. But the big show was a brilliant exhibit of modern Chinese printmaking. I took more notes of more astonishing woodcuts than you would care to hear about.
There were accordion books, and long scrolls, and broadside posters. Somber stuff like An Bin's Floating Corpses printed on brown fiber paper, and Zhao Yannien's The True Story of Ah Q, black images that reminded me of Goya's horrors of war series. Xu Bing had made Book from the Sky, four books handprinted in wood type in which the characters are entirely meaningless. I saw lines of every character, from strong bold rough lines in black, to fine quiet still lines printed in white on gray (Gao Rongsheng's "Forbidden City"). Everything from urban subjects, to portraits of various minority peoples, to evocative natural compositions from the "Great Northern Wastes Artists Association". I loved the color, and their compositional purity, and the fact that there is a Great Northern Wastes Artists Association.
I saw astonishing examples of block printing techniques that I had hardly heard of before, particularly the waste-block process, in which the same block is re-cut and different colors printed in small editions. I loved that there is a Cynical Realism movement.
Out in the lobby, artist Xu Zhongou was printing an enormous scroll from a series of four-foot blocks. The official opening was that very night. The exhibit is there until March 4.