Wang Qi, a renowned printmaking artist, surprised his students
and friends on January 12 by donating a total of 816 prints from
his private collection to the National Art Museum of China.
"These works have been with me for more than half a century. Now
I have found a good home for them," Wang said.
The donated prints have mostly been created by himself since the
early 1930s and also by other Chinese and foreign printmakers of
the 20th century, some of which were purchased by Wang. He has also
swapped some foreign maker's prints with his own works when he
staged exhibitions abroad.
A grand exhibition of about 300 of the donated works is on show
at the museum and will run through this Sunday. Also on show are
some of his sketches, ink paintings and calligraphic works.
Wang's earliest woodblock print work on display, entitled
Guerillas in Snowy Mountains, was created in 1939 to
portray Chinese people's fight against Japanese aggressors in
Northeast China.
Wang, a retired professor with the Central Academy of Fine Arts
and senior advisor of the Chinese Artists' Association, has created
numerous realistic woodblock prints depicting social changes in
modern China since the 1930s.
Born in Yibin, Southwest China's Sichuan Province in 1918 into
an affluent family, Wang received basic training in traditional
Chinese painting. He was admitted to the Western art department of
Shanghai Fine Arts Junior College in 1934.
In1938, Wang studied in the fine arts department of Lu Xun
Literature and Art Institute in Yan'an of Northwest China's Shaanxi
Province and embarked on a decades-long road of creating woodblock
prints to depict social changes in China.
His work Guerillas in Snowy Mountains appeared in
Chongqing's Xinhua Daily on February 28, 1939.
In 1942, the Chinese Woodblock Prints Research Association was
established in Chongqing, where Wang was elected as managing
director in charge of publishing the group's work in local
newspapers and magazines.
Since 1952, Wang has taught in the Central Academy of Fine Arts
in Beijing until the early 1990s. And he compiled the first book on
Western art history for Chinese artists in the 1960s.
As editor-in-chief of Fine Arts magazine in the early 1980s,
Wang introduced the latest overseas information to Chinese artists
who were eager to know about the outside world at a time when China
was recovering from the chaotic "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and
began opening up and reforms.
Because of his outstanding work for Chinese art circles, Wang
received a Chinese Modern Prints Outstanding Achievement Award from
the Chinese Artists' Association in 1991. In 2003 he was awarded
with the China Golden Award for Lifetime Achievement in Fine Arts
from the Chinese Artists' Association and All China Federation of
Arts and Literary Circles.
"The donated works are of great importance for the studies of
modern Chinese art history, and the art of printmaking in China in
particular," said Fan Di'an, curator of the museum.
(China Daily January 20, 2006)
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