On a recent visit to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, we were lucky enough to be able to attend the thesis exhibition of students concentrating in print. The Central Academy is considered by many to be the top art schools in China and boasts many notable famous alumni though it’s history. Recently relocated to a new campus recently (most likely fueled by the recent market boom in Chinese contemporary art). The school has a beautiful campus composed of somber modern buildings built out of graphite grey brick, and boasts a great new museum designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. The photos in this posting will focus mainly on interesting student from the exhibition.
What would a trip to an art school be without a giant Transformer-style robot sculpture?
The print work was in the basement gallery (some things never change). The gallery itself was huge and broken up into smaller spaces like the one above by divider walls. The exhibition contained the thesis work by dozens of artists. Far too many to display here, the work selected for this posting represent only a handful of work that caught my eye as we cruised through the exciting exhibition.
The work above (and below) is a life-size paper-craft bed room. The work appears to be digitally printed, cut and folded. In additions to the bedroom the flattened, pre-cut and folded versions hung on frames nearby.
The artist below was focusing on line engraving and currency (everyone really is printing their own money). His work displayed a number of custom designed bills including this Obama 100 US Dollar Bill.
And this great self-portrait (?) as a 111 RMB note. In this case, it looks like he scanned the engraving and then added the modern color elements.
This artist made a series of large subtle landscapes using relief printing (above) and also made a long, beautiful scroll book that illustrated how he made the larger landscapes and included many smaller examples (below).
This fun print is a 1/8 scale print of a mass-transit bus. It looks to be digitally printed and is displayed as a large cut shape sandwiched between glass.
The work below are a series of masterfully crafted relief prints depicting Peking Opera stars in subtle monochromatic hues.
This last series are a few examples of some large scale etchings that play off of traditional chinese ink painting tropes but with a playful-comic book sensibility.
I need to apologize to the artists in this exhibition the didactic information was in Chinese characters, if you email me I will happily include your names and any pertinent links.
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