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Tokyo Stories and Beyond at The Ashmolean
We take a look at three exhibitions spotlighting works from across Asia, showing now at Oxford's Ashmolean...
May 31, 2023
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
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In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
-min.jpg)
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
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With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
Tokyo Stories, a new film from Exhibition on Screen, takes the Ashmolean Museum’s 2021 exhibition Tokyo: Art and Photography as its starting point. Whilst it premieres and screens across the UK, the museum continues to explore storytelling traditions in its own collections.
In Kabuki Legends, contemporary Japanese artist Takahashi Hiromitsu depicts exciting moments in Japan’s traditional dance-drama. We get infamous scenes made familiar in ukiyo-e woodblock prints: ‘Dog heroes’, or magically-connected brothers born into different families, The big samurai Gengorō mid-boom, Shibaraku (‘Wait a moment!’). But we also see powerful women, and a kimono-shop-thief covered in tattoos; stories less prominent in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.
Hiromitsu practises dynamic stencil printmaking, or kappazuri. It’s a labour intensive process, typically used to dye kimono, and here combined with his creative use of media. Take ‘Pulling the Elephant’ (1998), which employs crinkly paper to mimic the texture of the animal’s skin. It also hints at the long history of exchange between (the emperors of) Japan and China.
More contemporary Asian histories can be found downstairs, in Art in China: 1949-1999. From Chairman Mao’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we see how artists creatively responded to the strict political controls during the Cultural Revolution, and the cultural freedoms which followed his death in 1976.
The sheer diversity is thrilling, shattering the stereotypes of singular experiences or monolithic control in communist China, and the curation is just as subtly subversive; after this first mention, Mao himself gets tucked away in the middle, in a section on poetry, students, and women’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution.
Here too hang ‘traditional’ scrolls from the big names of literati ink painting like Huang Binhong and Fu Baoshi; but look closer, and you’ll find steam ships and light towers, signs of a modern nation under socialist construction. They also evidence the contemporary creation of history, and incorporation of regional into national identities. Take the Great Wall of China, an ancient construction, but a modern motif, one which doesn’t crop up in ink paintings until the patriotic landscapes of the late twentieth century.
These grand narratives are grounded in artists’ individual histories, relayed through their works. There’s Pu Quan, an imperial prince of the last generation of the Qing Dynasty, who became an official painter of the PRC after 1949, as well as the winking owls of Huang Yongyu, for which he was denounced and imprisoned by ‘Mao’s wife’, Jiang Qing.
Modern propaganda prints pre-date neo-expressionist works in Europe, and seem more contemporary to Japanese creative prints in style. Here, they speak to the history of the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang) School of painting.
Chao Mei co-opts the bright red colour of sorghum – a grain used to produce baijiu – to depict the reclamation of this ‘wasteland’ into fertile farmland. He was one of ten million soldiers sent to north east China for ‘re-education’ in the late 1950s; another, Zhang Zhenqi, was a key founder of the School, who used non-key block printing techniques to depict natural scenes and ethnic minorities in rural locations. (For more regional representations, see ‘Ming Landscape’ (1995) by Wei Dong, an artist from Inner Mongolia).
Indeed, it’s a long while before we see the ‘formulaic smiling’ and influence of Soviet socialist realism, the stereotypical images of the period. Zhang Chaoyang’s woodblock prints share the same vibrant yellow as those by Zhao Xiaomo, one of many educated young people who applied to be agricultural workers – and the exhibition’s only woman artist. The individual’s (limited) agency is underscored in her creative practice, as she transitions towards folk style Chinese ink printing in the 1980s.
Then Art in China moves into minimalist woodcut prints and large-scale ink brush paintings. Another contrast; the ‘Spring of Arts and Literature’ that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution is depicted almost wholly in monochrome; artists like Wang Qi take it more literally, referring to the seasons in their scenes.
Though described as the ‘first generation’ of modern Chinese printmakers, these artists continue to blend together historic and contemporary, local and global influences. Chen Qi’s large-scale prints of individual objects challenge the notion of woodcut as a small, tonally limited practice, combining both traditional Chinese water-soluble printing, and Western-style chiaroscuro.
It closes with contemporary artists like Qu Leilei of the Dissident Stars Group (Xingxing pai), who left China to settle in London, and Xu Bing, who lived for a period in New York. Yet again, we find travel running through the exhibition’s core, with artists like Fu Shuda, who illustrated books in the US and for the colonial British governments in India and Singapore, collected by Geoffrey Hedley, the British Council Representative in China.
Down another flight of stairs, we find another émigré on display; Dia al-Azzawi, one of the Arab world’s most influential living artists, moved from Iraq to London in 1976, where he has been based ever since. His practice is the very definition of multidisciplinary, informed by archaeology, poetry, and traditional figurative calligraphy (calligrams) alike. These traditional Islamic arts, curated in conversation with his contemporary works, challenge the over-simplification of the form as the opposite of representational.
Painting Poetry focuses on his distinctive practice of making dafatir (notebooks) and ‘drawn poems’. From 1983, al-Azzawi has used the media to document everyday experiences of conflict, highlighting historical continuities in contemporary politics. His ‘War Diaries’ (1991) stand as witnesses to Operation Desert Storm, the US Army’s intervention in the Gulf War. It culminates here in his huge ‘Iraqi Book of Darkness’ (2020) – what the artist considers to be the latest chapter in a long history.
By playing with scale, Al-Azzawi also highlights the connections between grand and individual narratives. A vast monochrome tapestry-mural depicts the IS invasion of Mosul in 2017. In style, it recalls the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera - in content, the horrors of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Smaller - but similarly horrifying - sculptural works sit opposite. Hinged open like religious icons – or his own artist’s books - they highlight the ungodly suffering endured across southwest Asia. ‘Four Children Playing Football’ (2014) pays homage to the young Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. (His politics remain personal, focussed on lived experience, and the general ‘loss of innocence and hope’.)
With jarring contrasts – between bright colours and verse, and black-and-white witness documents –the artist speaks to the plurality of experiences across a region simplified as the Middle East. These stories are ones of ‘expression and resilience’, which deserve to be heard more often.
Kabuki Legends: Stencil Prints of Takahashi Hiromitsu is on view until 4 February 2024
Art in China: 1949-1999 is on view until 24 September 2023
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is on view until 11 June 2023
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
