Asia Art Center is honored to announce the opening of "We Are All Long-Trekking Fragments: Chinese Water-Based Woodblock Print Youth Project · 2025 Annual Exhibition" on October 25, 2025. Curated by Zhang Xumin, the exhibition will feature over forty water-based woodblock prints by eleven artists: Cao Yu, Choi Rye, Dong Minjie, Qi Ziyi, Lucio, Wang Qifan, Wang Yizhi, Xu Chentao, Xian Su, Yan Xinguo, and Judge Chow.
Why should l launch the "Chinese Water based Woodblock Youth Program"?
Chen Qi
China, as the birthplace of printmaking, boasts a vibrant history of traditional printmaking. On the world map of print art, two primary styles have emerged: the Western tradition, dominated by intaglio, lithography, and oil-based woodcuts, and the Eastern style, represented by China’s unique water-based woodblock prints. To some extent, water-based woodblock printing is not merely a technical genre but a profound expression of Chinese artistic spirit. This technique has played a pivotal role in showcasing China’s printmaking artistry internationally and in communicating Chinese cultural values. Over the years, I have been committed to promoting and disseminating water-based woodblock printing, seeing it as my most important mission beyond my work in teaching and creative practice. I recognize that this is a long and arduous journey; creating water-based woodblock art and cultivating talents in this field require considerable time, and the progress can be rather slow, which makes those quick results are difficult to achieve.
Since 2019, I have created a water-based woodblock piece titled “Welcoming the New Year with Auspicious Snow” each year, auctioning it to raise funds for exhibitions and publications under the "Chinese Water-based Woodblock Youth Program." My hope is to encourage young artists to engage in water-based woodblock art creation and theoretical research, thereby advancing the art form in China.
In June 2021, the inaugural annual exhibition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Youth Program opened. Curated by Duan Shaofeng, it focused on young instructors in art academies with the theme “The Fourth Generation: Image and Media”. The exhibition introduced the concept of “The Fourth Generation of Water-based Woodblock Artists,” situating them within historical and cultural contexts. It showcased the fourth generation while tracing the development of contemporary water-based woodblock education and envisioning future possibilities in the field.
In September 2022, Feng Shi curated the second annual exhibition, introducing a new academic perspective with the theme “Diffuse Boundary” (Visual Proliferation – Bodily Experience). This exhibition placed water-based woodblock printing within the vast frameworks of contemporary history, global history, and personal history, aiming to revisit discussions on this uniquely Eastern “trace” art form in relation to “printing technology, media art, and spiritual proliferation.”
In October 2023, Wang Zhengyi, curator of the third annual exhibition, redirected the focus to the essence of water-based woodblock art itself. Under the theme “The Flowing Origin”, the exhibition explored the evolution of the art form, delving into the path from “ontological awareness” to “cultural consciousness.”
In 2024, the program’s fourth annual exhibition, curated by Zhang Xinying, adopts “Growing Rationality” as its core theme. Centered on the context of contemporary water-based woodblock art and its ecological ontology, the exhibition addresses topics such as ecological sustainability, history, foundational theories, and criticism.
The latest edition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Youth Program Exhibition, curated by Zhang Xumin, centers on the theme of the awakening of watercolor printmaking in our time. Framed by the spiritual imagery of “We Are All from The Fragments That Have Been Trekking For a Long Journey,” the exhibition presents the poetic representation of memory and existence in water-based woodblock art, as well as the philosophical reflections it refracts within the context of technological ethics.
To date, fifty emerging artists have been invited to participate in the program, presenting more than 320 works. In May 2024 and June 2025, the Special Exhibition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Youth Program was invited to be held at the Shanghai Hongqiao Contemporary Art Museum and the Yichun Museum of Art, marking the growing recognition of the program within academic circles and the increasing support it has received from the broader cultural community.
I am deeply grateful to the artists and art institutions supporting the "Chinese Water-based Woodblock Youth Program," as well as the generous support from Central Academy of Fine Arts Education Development Foundation and Asia Art Center. Let us work together to contribute to the prosperity of Chinese water-based woodblock art.
We Are All from Fragments that Have Been on the Way for a Long Time
Zhang Xumin
The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, in his poem Hommages, employs the image of “fragments that have been on the way for a long time” as a metaphor for humanity’s drifting and convergence across time and space — through the long voyage, we are both the dust of history and the sparks of the future. In the vast existence of the universe, humankind is at once nature’s rebel and its eternal prisoner; our lives scatter like fragments across different dimensions — material, spiritual, and virtual — yet shine with undying brilliance in the sacred hymn of art.
The theme “fragments that have been on the way for a long time” carries a multiplicity of spiritual resonances. On one hand, the modernization of civilization continuously divides the physical space between nature and the self. The concrete jungle of industrialization has rendered humanity increasingly lost within the labyrinthine spectacle of modern systems. The ambition to conquer and nature’s inevitable retaliation have become the ultimate conflict of the postmodern world, while the longing for truth, goodness, and beauty lies in quiet redemption, like a Sunken Stone. On the other hand, though the blaze of the digital revolution seems to illuminate the path of human civilization, the technological surge — the Tongues of Fire — has seared binary scars into the very texture of society, corroding our emotional and perceptual realities. What once were vivid memories of life are now quantified into symbolic fragments and virtual codes, where silence echoes the solitude of unanswered existence.
Indeed, the creation of water-based woodblock is itself a form of “ on the way.” The grain of the wood bears the traces of time; the depth of carving embodies both resistance and formation; and the ink’s permeation becomes a metaphor for the diffusion and condensation of vitality. The multiplicity of the watercolor printmaking, the transience of its watery traces, and the contingency of the knife’s incisions recall the poetic lines —
“Inscriptions on church bells
and proverbs written across saints
and many-thousand-year-old seeds.”
Though they carry the weight of human memory, they cannot escape the silent erosion of time. With the knife as his pen, the artist interlaces the imprints of civilization at the threshold between wood and paper — a gesture that is both a retrospective of tradition and a prophecy of the future.
As ubiquitous digital interfaces blur the boundary between the real and the illusory, we are compelled to confront a series of embodied predicaments — the fluidity of individual identity, the erosion of collective memory, the alienation of subjectivity, and the suspension of attention. Together, these evoke a posthuman condition that is increasingly mobile, unstable, and fragmented. When human civilization has trekked for so long through both physical and virtual realms, can fragments — as traces of existence and metaphors of connection — also become the possibility of rebirth? In facing such crises, the spirit of water-based woodblock offers a wisdom of integration amid dispersion, a resolve for simplicity born of depth. Within its restrained endurance and poetic freedom lies an illumination of the enduring vitality of Eastern philosophy. Thus, every woodblock and every printed trace in the process of watercolor printmaking becomes not only a physical incision but also a spiritual inscription. In recognizing the fractured nature of postmodern life, watermark printing transcends its traditional visual domain to confront the philosophical question of human existence itself — aspiring, through the affirmative power of artistic practice, toward an awareness and reconciliation beyond sameness.
From the early reproduction of religious imagery to the dissemination of secular texts and the cultivation of literati aesthetics, and onward into modern times, printmaking has continually sought the purity of its own artistic language. As an externalized manifestation of Eastern spirit, water-based woodblock has always maintained an open posture, thereby resonating with the sociocultural production of each historical phase. This exhibition takes contemporary young artists’ watercolor printmaking works as its visual medium, unfolding through a sequential constellation of metaphors — Sunken Stone, Tongues of Fire, and Elegy for Love — forming a progressive narrative. Together, they compose a lyrical meditation on the condition of human existence today. Through the ritualistic essence unique to watermark printing, the exhibition further poses the question: amid the evolution of civilization — in our conquest of nature, our indulgence in technology, and our pursuit of the unknown — how might humanity, in its fragmented state, forge a consciousness of eternity?