Woodblock difference

The woodblock printing technique came from China to Japan several hundred years ago. The Japanese developed it into one of the most admired art forms in the world. The high level of Japanese woodblock artisans has been preserved until our days.

With the opening of China, a vivid cultural exchange has started around 1980 between Japan and China. In the beginning it was more of a one-way street. Chinese artists and artisans came to Japan to learn traditional woodblock printmaking. Some Japanese cultural institutions promote modern Chinese art with exhibitions in Japan and purchases of contemporary works for Japanese museums.

painting. Although Japanese painting is a descendant of the Chinese example and, therefore, shares many of its ideas and rules, the accomplished painting reveals, here as there, the attitude particular to each of the two cultures. The uninitiated at first see what is obviously common to both of them.

Chinese and Japanese art and Chinese and Japanese colour prints seem very similar and are often confused. No mention of Chinese colour prints was made in Europe before 1907, while Japanese prints have been known in the West since 1862 and have been collected enthusiastically since that time. 

Chinese paintings normally consist of small or large colour brush strokes with- out any dark linear contours. At most, the veins of a leaf may be rendered in dark strokes but rarely the outlines. It is the task of the Chinese colour printer to copy the colours of the painted original exactly; scarcely any other variety of colour prints in the world is more dependent on the printer's artistic skill than the Chinese colour print.

The old Japanese colour print, or ukiyo-e, is where the colour comes after the printing process. Its basis is a mere black- and-white brush drawing in outline, not a painting in the strict sense. The colours of the finished print as a rule fill outlined areas and are rarely brush strokes without contours. Basically, the colours are designed after cutting the outline or key block.