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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
Posted by Jason Urban on August 21st, 2009 | 
Now that the construction of the Three Gorges Dam is up and running, clearly some of China’s top minds must have time on their hands. How else do we explain this: Chinese entrepreneurs are marketing a new innovation to harnesses the power of nature- The Flower Printing Machine! This technology may seem like a gift from the gods (the lightning in the promo pic certainly doesn’t contradict that view) but it’s one hundred percent man-made. Leave it to the culture that first developed printing to take printing to the next level!
Many a poet has waxed on about the beauty of a flower, but it takes real ingenuity to to take that beauty and make it even better.
When it comes to floral printing, Canada won’t be outdone. Here’s the video…
(Thanks, Luther.)
Posted by amze on July 31st, 2009 | 
While traveling in Shanghai any artist should visit the M50 arts district, a former textile mill the sprawling brutalist factory complex is now home to over 120 galleries, workshops and cafes. One location that stands out among the art world power brokers is No. 17 Gallery, which is not really a gallery at all but a boutique specializing in high-end designed clothes, hats, posters and objects for the hipster set.
An independent-minded, spirited hip youth culture may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about China, and it’s true that the student movements of the 80’s do seem more or less to be a thing of the past but like much of china’s urban population the youth now see themselves as a part of a global (if consumer-driven) scene. Thankfully this means there are lots of hybrid art/design/printed stuff for the aesthetically conscience fashionista. It is important to note that while the gear in No.17 Gallery may relate to the kinds of items seen in Berlin, Brooklyn or Tokyo the youth culture scene in China’s urban centers is a unique fusion.
More images after the jump.
Continue reading Dispatches from China: Youth Culture & The Multiple
Posted by amze on July 2nd, 2009 | 
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.
Continue reading Dispatches from China: Art School
Posted by amze on June 25th, 2009 | 
Having just returned from China, this will be the first of several posts on the some of the printeresting things seen while traveling. I should say that I didn’t attend the Sanbao International Printmaking Symposium and tour in Jingdezhen organized in part by Minna Resnick and Jackson Li, so I won’t be making any reports on the wonders that group may have seen (if anyone on that trip would like to post here please email me).
The observations and photographs in this post are meant to convey a few observations of how printed matter fits into everyday life in China.
Branded fruits! I’m sure this coming to a super market near you soon.
I should add at this point in my education I can only read the most basic Chinese characters and have no idea what’s written on these fruits (any translations from our readers are most welcome).
The media buzz about China often starts with some statement about how the country is building a 21st century infastructure, well you can add their print infastructure to the list of great leaps forward fueled by the ascendent Chinese economy. Walking the streets of Beijing and Shanghai one can’t help but think that there isn’t a problem that can’t be solved with a large vinyl banner, billboard or sticker. Like many technological leap-frogs the local sign industry seems to have moved past screen printing or any US-style nostalgia for hand-painted signs.
Continue reading Dispatches from China: View from the Street
Posted by Jason Urban on May 19th, 2009 | Because not everyone is going to China this summer… Big Cartel offers these stamp sets based on Chinese architectural forms. The modular units are used to “build” your own buildings. Hours of fun for $35- pretend that you’re there for a mere fraction of the cost of a flight to China. Here’s a flickr set documenting the possibilities.
 1 person likes this post.
Posted by amze on July 1st, 2008 |
Beijing is a world-class boomtown, throwing up new buildings at a staggering pace. While traveling around the city observing all this raging architectural growth one can’t help but be intrigued by the way a kind of urban camouflage is being employed to hide all the activity.
As you can see in these pictures, large format photographic/digital images are printed onto an all-weather material and wrapped around the construction sites. These wrap-around prints often operate as a kind of large scale Trompe-l’œil piece, portraying the site prior to the demolition.
In other cases they depict what the site will look like following completion of the construction. This is more in line with the billboards you often see in western cities at the site of new development.
One could speculate that this practice is intended to soften the psychological blow of the lost architectural and personal history. Or perhaps it’s just a pragmatic means to hide an eyesore. Whatever the case, this practice creates strange moments of dissonance and make one wonder what other ways this technology might be employed.
Posted by Jason Urban on May 20th, 2008 | 
With China in the news, I was reminded of a story the NYTimes did a while back about the town of Dafen (near Hong Kong), also called the village of ten thousand painters. Like human printing presses, artisans are trained to reproduce masterworks at a rate of up to 30 paintings a day. From Shanghai-Central.com…
Approximately five million oil paintings are manufactured in Dafen annually created by roughly 8000 to 10,000 painters, each year a few hundred join the “club” also a lot of real artists are moving to the village every year, here they can have continuous income. About 10% of the paintings created are done only by the creativity of the artist, no copy work.
By the end of the year a private art school is planned to raise new talents, actually for this kind of art not much talent is needed.
From the NY Times article…
One advantage of the larger operations is that they allow specialization, with simple assembly lines like those that Henry Ford brought to the automobile industry.
Repetition isn’t printmaking, but printmaking is repetition, right? I love the image of the room full of easels with the same painting.
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