Newman Huo

    PIECES by 50 artists from the eight most influential print workshops in the United States are being displayed at Guan Shanyue Art Museum through Dec. 5.

    Titled “American Printmaking Now,” the exhibition offers a review of American printmaking in the past three decades.

    Three print workshops represented in the exhibition were founded in the 1960s: Gemini G.E.L. Los Angles, California in 1966; Graphicstudio, University of South Florida in 1968; and Pace Prints, New York, in 1968.

    The most recent print workshop participating in the exhibition is the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, New York, founded in 1997.

    As the exhibition shows, many techniques that depend on digital, electronic, photographic, and other mediums and methods have been coupled with some of the more traditional ones.

    Among artists of the 1960s were several whose intention was to create large, mural-sized prints as well as mixed media combinations of printing techniques.

    Visualizing their prints as larger than human size, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosequist started to mix print mediums that could extend into very large compositions.

    Rauschenberg is extremely sensitive to materials. He possesses extraordinary courage and imagination and is highly effective at using non-traditional sculpture and painting materials to do play between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces.

    In his “Ruminations” print series, the mark of flowing water on paper flickers, arousing nostalgia, as paper, watermark and a large amount of blank space create a sense of lightness.

    In Chuck Close’s work, “Self-portrait Woodcut,” pattern-type strokes convey a peculiar sense of writing. Reading each square in the grid, line by line, viewers will discover that the artist almost writes square characters stroke by stroke.

    In the prints, “The Wonderfulness of Downtown” by Jane Hammond and “Shoe Strings” by Elizabeth Murray, while both are displayed vertically on the wall, all pictorial elements appear spread out across a table, like chess pieces on a chessboard.

    Nocola Lopez’s series, “Urban Transformation,” consists of images of buildings, girders, safety fencing, and pipes printed in a variety of colors on different papers and mylar; the final vision arrives when she collages everything together in a wild-looking bundle.

    Joseph Scheer’s digital print, “Moths,” follows his longtime dedication to making large-scale woodblock prints.

    Scheer used a high-resolution scanner to capture images at different depths of focus. The moths were scanned approximately 30 times, and in-focus information from each scan was processed to create the final image where every part of the moths was crisply detailed.

    “As this exhibit clearly demonstrates, printmaking is more than the sum of its methods,” said the exhibition’s curator Chen Xiaowen, a Chinese artist and professor of the Alfred University School of Art and Design in New York.

    “The collaborative nature of contemporary printmaking has enabled this art form to evolve from a replication process with industrial overtones into an artistic form where experimentation and investigation are supported without limitation,” Chen said.

    Shenzhen is the second stop for the “American Printmaking Now” exhibition, following its show at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.

    When the exhibition concludes, it will move to the Shanghai Art Museum and Zhejiang Art Museum next month.

    According to the organizers, this is the first time that American contemporary printing has been exhibited in China.

    Dates: Through Dec. 5

    Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Closed Monday

    Venue: Guan Shanyue Art Museum, 6026 Hongli Road, Futian District (福田区红荔路6026号关山月美术馆)

    Metro: Shao Nina Gong Station (Children’s Palace Station, 少年宫站), Exit B