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Posted by A FRIEND OF PRINTERESTING on August 17th, 2010 | A Guest Post by Evan Summer
 Guanlan Print Original Industry Base in Guanlan, China. Workshop areas for etching, lithography, silkscreen and woodcut are on the first floor, individual studios on the second.
In May and June 2010 I was an Artist in Residence at the Guanlan Print Original Industry Base in Guanlan, China. After participating in the 2007 and 2009 Guanlan Biennial Print Exhibitions, they invited me to be an artist in residence. I’ve never traveled much but knew I’d regret it if I didn’t take advantage of this opportunity.
The residencies are usually between three weeks and three months. During that time artists are expected to produce prints in any of the four standard areas: etching, serigraphy, lithography and relief. They are provided with studios, basic supplies, 24/7 access to the workshop and the help of technicians.
Requirements are flexible but resident artists usually produce prints that are printed in editions of 30 by the technicians.
 This is West Village, a 300-year old Hakka village where artists live during their stay.
The artists are provided food and housing in the nearby 300 year old Hakka Village. The Chinese government has essentially created a printmaking village with the idea of making Guanlan a major center of printmaking. Frequently foreign and Chinese artists from outside the area visit the workshop. They are often given tours by Mr. Li Kang and Mr. Zhao Jiachun, the administrators who organize residencies and work with artists. There are studios, galleries, exhibition spaces and framers, as well as a coffee shop and post office in the village.
Guanlan is in southern China, not far from Hong Kong. It is very close to the famous Mission Hills Golf Course and city of Shenzhen, itself a major center with a population greater than that of New York.
 Some working proofs hanging in Guanlan studio space.
Continue reading Printmaking Residency in Guanlan, China
Posted by Jason Urban on July 26th, 2010 | These posters were all over 798 Arts District in Beijing. Graphically, they stood out from a lot of the other street ads so I followed them to Stefan Eck’s exhibition, Raw, at the Pickled Art Center.
 Eck was a rare fix of graphic art in what felt like a sea of refined, representational oil painting. He was hanging out the gallery when I passed through so I got a chance to talk for a while. He hails originally from France though he’s something of a nomad having spent the last ten years living in Canada, Germany, Japan, and now China. His work seems to take its cues from a range of sources from underground comics to various modern art -isms. It was the tension between the different influences that made the work dynamic. “Raw” seemed like a well-chosen title.
When you’re done looking at the pictures here, you should go spend some time on Eck’s website.
 Continue reading Dispatches from China: Stefan Eck
Posted by Jason Urban on July 26th, 2010 | Iceland wasn’t the only country using printing technologies to augment their World Expo pavilion. The idea behind Estonia’s patterned design was that the “pavilion will be literally clad in bright folk costume, distinct from other Nordic pavilions with their more modest shade of colour.” It was if the whole building was enveloped in a layer of disruptive camouflage…
 Here’s a close up of the pattern showing its references to folk traditions. Continue reading Dispatches from China: Looking for Printed Matter at the 2010 Expo (Part 2)
Posted by Jason Urban on July 5th, 2010 | 
A cup of romantic, indeed! As a cultural tourist, often it’s the seemingly insignificant and mundane stuff that catches your attention. Here’s a random photo collection from the streets of Beijing and Shanghai. Some of them are more print-related than others but hopefully it all sheds some sort of light on the graphic identity and trends of the place.
 Lacoste has been translated into Chinese. Perhaps their logo revisions were inspired by the famed giant salamander of China?
Continue reading Dispatches from China: Randomness Observed
Posted by Jason Urban on July 2nd, 2010 | 
Hot on the heels of a tour-de-force Olympics extravaganza in 2008, China is currently hosting the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. This blue guy is “Haibao.” He’s the expo’s mascot and he is everywhere in China right now… on taxis and t-shirts, subway cars and shop windows. From inflatable Haibao statues in front of hotels to life-sized Haibaos walking around selling ice cream, he’s become the pervasive face of public service announcement and advertisement alike.
I spent one day at the Expo. While it was definitely a spectacle, looking back it seems like a rare case where the pictures actually appear better and more interesting than the reality. To be fair, as my time was limited, I couldn’t wait in three to four-hour lines to get into the more popular pavilions so there was plenty I missed. As always, I did keep an eye peeled for interesting uses of printed matter.
Leave it to Iceland to print up a big, glacial cube. It stood like some sort of Modernist iceberg in the Expo- not the biggest or the best pavilion, it did have a quiet economy to be appreciated. It was designed by Plús Arkitektar. I wasn’t able to stick around until sundown, but apparently all the printed fabric was backlit so that the whole pavilion became a glowing become of arctic geometry at night (pic from the website below).
 More symmetry like the urban camouflage I posted about earlier.
Continue reading Dispatches from China: Looking for Printed Matter at the 2010 Expo
Posted by Jason Urban on June 29th, 2010 | China has one hundred and fifty cities with populations greater than a million people. To put that in perspective, the US has only nine. Beijing and Shanghai have nearly 20 million each while New York City has less than nine. Needless to say, there’s lots of building going on as China’s city continue to grow. Interestingly, construction sites are often accompanied by allusions to idyllic nature in the form of vinyl signage. Amze mentioned this tromp-l’œil approach to urban camouflage in his Hidden in Plain Site post.
The juxtaposition of building materials and urban growth with images of green grass and trees quickly became one of my favorite sights while traveling around the city. Has this “beautification” strategy evolved as a direct response the high levels of pollution? Truth be told, I saw more images of blue skies than actual blue skies.
One of the best parts of these murals is that they are essentially repeat patterns… the images mirror creating these slightly surrealist moments.
 A bunch more pics after the jump… Continue reading Dispatches from China: Fake Nature
Posted by Jason Urban on June 28th, 2010 | If you’re lucky, summer is a time for travel. After a few weeks spent in Beijing and Shanghai, I’ve started working on posts to add to the Printeresting Dispatches from China series that Amze started last year. I actually hoped to do the posts directly from China but couldn’t open Printeresting! Plenty of art and design blogs were accessible (notcot, ffffound, swissmiss, & vvork to name a few) so I’m not sure why Printeresting and some others were MIA. Where the world’s most populous nation go when it needs a fix of interesting printmaking miscellany is anybody’s guess.
Since there haven’t been any additions to the series in a while, a review of past contributions seemed like a good idea… click on the pics for links.
 Hidden in Plain Site
 View from the Street
 Art School
 Youth Culture & The Multiple
 Printing History
And if those aren’t enough for you, here are few more China-related posts…
 Hey China! Just ’cause you can, doesn’t mean you should!
 Printing Chinese Architecture
 Man as Matrix
 Obamagraphics: Mao Edition
Posted by Jason Urban on December 3rd, 2009 | 
Printeresting has suffered from a long bout of Obamagraphics fatigue. It’s hard to believe that there hasn’t been single post relating to the Graphic Force that is Barack Obama since early spring! Some news from China last month seemed worth breaking the silence.
China may be a DVD counterfeiter’s dream but apparently it doesn’t mess around when it comes to t-shirts. Last month during Obama’s visit to Beijing, a Chinese entrepreneur learned that lesson the hard way. Liu Mingji is the designer of a popular Obama/Mao mash-up t-shirt. Mingji reportedly received a visit from uniformed officers from Beijing’s Industry and Commerce Administration. Though they officially deny any visit, Mingji has stopped all production and sales of the t-shirts.
While the shirt design can be read as potentially offensive and/or funny depending on one’s political leanings, it seems more likely that most sales were made based on kitsch appeal. Is it just me or does China seem like an unlikely opponent of junky souvenirs?
(via Steve Seidman’s Posters and Election Propaganda)
Posted by Jason Urban on September 28th, 2009 | Speaking of Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Chinese artist Lin Tianmiao worked with STPI to create an impressive print/paperworks series titled Focus on Paper. Tianmiao is a Beijing-based artist known more famously for her installation work. In these two-dimensional works, she emphasizes the tactility of the paper through hole punches, flocking, and embossment…
 Lin Tianmiao, Focus VI A, Lithography, embossment and hole punch on handmade paper, 50″x40x.7″, 2006.
 Lin Tianmiao, Focus XII A, Lithography, Embossment, and Flocking on Handmade Paper, 50″x40″, 2006.
 Click on this pic to read a review of the work.
Posted by amze on August 29th, 2009 | 
This will be the last installment of the Dispatches from China series of posts for a while (at least until we can find a regular correspondent). In closing up this series I wanted to reflect on the place ephemeral print occupies in Chinese culture as an artifact within a culture that has an extremely long history of sophisticated printmaking, but also as a means of constructing collective memory. With this in mind, I set about wandering with my camera ready.
It turns out I didn’t have to wander far, any neighborhood that traffics in tourists will have posters for sale. Most of the posters are great examples of various stages of propaganda poster utilized during the thirty tumultuous years following the founding the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), while a few are advertisements from the relatively short-lived Republic of China.
For pocket change you can own an ‘authentic’ poster from the early days of the PRC. I say authentic because on closer examination most of what you’ll find on the street are off-set prints that have been meticulously aged (perhaps with tea?) to look the part of aged artifacts. The posters, whether real or not, contain great imagery from the early days of Chairman Mao when the artists were encouraged to turn away from a historic Chinese visual culture that had (so the story goes) supported centuries of oppression and instead make a new art for the people. This early work can be identified by the clear influence Soviet Social Realism had on the chinese artists; these were most often lithographic reproductions of history paintings. During the Cultural Revolution artists migrated back to the traditional form of the woodblock print; allowing the posters take on a more graphic quality, often using just red and black (hmm.. this work reminds me of someone).
Clearly I don’t have room and you don’t have time for an art history lesson, but if this is a topic that excites you as much as it does me, I would refer to you to Art and China’s Revolution exhibition at the Asia Society and the book by Melissa Chiu ).
One last thought to complicate matters, by and large the bulk of tourists on the streets of Beijing where these pictures are sold are Chinese tourists visiting their capital. The reception one of these posters must have to a survivor of The Great Leap Forward must be very different from the western view, perhaps of well-designed cold war kitsch.
More pictures and less words after the jump.
Continue reading Dispatches from China: Printing History
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