West Lake Panorama: A Millennium of Woodblock Printing

The exhibition celebrates the storied history of printmaking and woodblock technologies which have developed around Hangzhou’s West Lake area for the past millennium. Known as ‘water-printing’ (shuiyin), the technique of working with water-soluble colours and wooden blocks, has been widely used throughout contemporary Chinese printmaking. The process allows for complex forms of overprinting in order to reproduce a nearly infinite range of colours. The exhibition includes contemporary ink landscapes ranging from the mid-1980s to present day, along with Ming and Qing dynasty woodblock editions.