Asia Art Center is pleased to announce The Unspoken: Youth Project for Chinese Water‑Block Woodcut · Annual Exhibition 2026, opening on 19 September 2026. Curated by Julie Zhu, the exhibition presents over one‑hundred works by ten artists: Chen Meixin, Fang Yan, Fang Fan, Jin Jiayuan, Li Yang, Ryuta Suzuki, Lu Jiang, Yang Jie, Yang Lu and Zhu Tuo.
Why I Launch the "Chinese Water-based Woodblock Printmaking Youth Program"
Chen Qi
China, 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 printmaking is not merely a technical genre but a profound expression of the 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 printmaking, 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 prints and cultivating talent in this field require considerable time.
Since 2019, I have been creating water-based woodblock prints on the theme of "Welcoming the New Year with Auspicious Snow" at the end of each year, offering them for charity sale to raise funds for exhibitions and publications under the "Chinese Water-based Woodblock Printmaking Youth Program." My hope is to encourage young artists to engage in water-based woodblock print creation and theoretical research, thereby advancing this art form in China.
In June 2021, the inaugural annual exhibition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Printmaking Youth Program opened. Curated by Duan Shaofeng, it focused on young instructors in art academies under 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 printmaking 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". This exhibition placed millennia-old water-based woodblock printmaking 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 printmaking 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 October 2024, the program's fourth annual exhibition, curated by Zhang Xinying, adopted "Growing Rationality" as its core theme. Centered on the context of contemporary water-based woodblock prints and its ecological ontology, the exhibition addressed topics such as ecology, history, foundational theories, and criticism.
In October 2025, Zhang Xumin curated the fifth annual exhibition, focusing on water-based printmaking's awakening in our time. Framed by "We Are All Fragments That Have Long Been Trekking," it presented poetic representations of memory and existence, and the philosophical speculation they refract, in the context of technological ethics.
The current annual exhibition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Printmaking Youth Program is curated by Zhu Li. Under the theme "The Unspoken," it addresses the question of "medium expansion and language renewal in water-based woodblock printmaking." By focusing on how water-based woodblock print continuously expands its own boundaries through materials, techniques, concepts, and cross-media practice in order to reconstruct visual experience, the exhibition offers methodological insights for contemporary art's reflection on the medium itself and on the mechanisms by which its language is generated.
To date, sixty emerging artists have been invited to participate in the program, presenting more than 480 works. In May 2024 and June 2025, the Special Exhibition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Printmaking 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 academia 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 Printmaking Youth Program," as well as to the Central Academy of Fine Arts Education Development Foundation and Asia Art Center for their generous support. Let us work together to contribute to the prosperity of Chinese water-based woodblock printmaking art.
The Unspoken: 2026 Annual Exhibition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Printmaking Youth Program
Zhu Li
Founded on the media mechanism of the "impression," water-based woodblock printmaking possesses a dual nature: the dissemination of mass images, and the expression of the artist's thought. It is precisely this intertwining of functions that has kept it continually situated within the complex relations of tradition and modernity, reproduction and creation, technique and art.
Discussion of the medium of water-based woodblock printmaking thus becomes a "foundational question." From the moment of its birth, printmaking has taken reproduction, translation, and dissemination as its core; its long-accumulated experience of image conversion, and the media consciousness thereby formed, happen to find a historical resonance with contemporary art's renewed attention to medium, language, and the mechanisms of their generation. This edition of the Chinese Water-based Woodblock Printmaking Youth Program unfolds around "the medium expansion and language renewal of water-based woodblock printmaking," emphasizing its openness as a medium. This raises a central question: in an age of "pan-media," why do we still need water-based woodblock printmaking? What insights can its distinctive material impressions and its translational and indirect experience offer to the creation and imagination of contemporary art?
The exhibition theme "The Unsaid" responds to the aesthetic pursuit in traditional Chinese art of "meaning beyond words" (yi zai yan wai) and of "words may be exhausted, but meaning is inexhaustible" (yan you jin er yi wu qiong). It emphasizes that the significance of art extends beyond its visible forms, residing also in the rich perceptual space that these forms open up. At the same time, "unspoken" also points to what remains inexhaustible within language itself. As an art form deeply rooted in tradition, water-based woodblock printmaking takes this as an opportunity to continually reflect upon itself. Through the reconfiguration of materials, techniques, and artistic concepts, it continues to transcend its established boundaries and explore an ever-expanding realm of new possibilities.