Jiangsu Art Museum

Jiangsu Art Museum, on Changjiang Road in Nanjing’s Xuanwu District, occupies a special place in the history of Chinese art. Built in 1936, it was the first national-level art museum in modern China, a milestone that marked the formal beginning of the country’s museum-based art development. Architect Xi Fuquan designed its original building, once known as the National Art Gallery. The façade of the main hall takes the shape of the Chinese character “山” (mountain), blending traditional Chinese architectural sensibilities with the language of early modern Western design. The museum’s newer building, designed by the German architectural firm KSP, began construction in 2008. Together, the old and new buildings span nearly 40,000 square meters. The collection focuses mainly on modern and contemporary art, with particular strength in works by artists of the New Jinling School, while also encompassing important lineages such as the Wumen School, the Four Wangs of the early Qing, the Eight Masters of Jinling, the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, and the Shanghai School.

This time, I visited the museum’s new building. I had originally gone in the hope of seeing an exhibition of New Jinling School painting, only to discover, with the mild tragedy familiar to all museum-goers, that it had closed on August 2. So that encounter will have to wait for another day, presumably in the old building.

When I arrived, only Halls 1 and 2 on the first floor were open, both devoted to “Engraving the Journey: Yang Han Print Art Exhibition.” The exhibition featured Yang Han’s print works. Black-and-white prints often create a visual experience defined by order, structure, and strong formal clarity. Yet some of the works here carried a liveliness I instinctively associate with Chinese painting—a supple rhythm, a kind of inner motion—that surprised me pleasantly. On the basement level, there was also a permanent exhibition and research display dedicated to water-based woodblock printing. This was my first real encounter with the medium, and it quietly unsettled my rather rigid assumptions about printmaking. The water-based woodblock works on view were bright yet harmonious in color, vivid in contour, and exquisitely detailed. Had no one told me they were prints, I might not have guessed so quickly. Prints, it turns out, can be much less “print-like” than one imagines.

At that point, it seemed necessary to step back and think more systematically about what printmaking actually is. Printmaking is an art form built on the process of making a plate, applying ink, and transferring the image. Its technical heart lies in the plate itself: artists carve, etch, draw, or otherwise work on wood, copper, stone, or screen, then transfer the image onto paper or another surface. Because the image reaches us through this intermediate material rather than directly from the artist’s hand to the paper, prints naturally retain traces of the process—knife marks, textures, embossing, overlays, broken passages of ink, dots, grain. These are not incidental leftovers; they are part of the language. They are, in a sense, the accent of printmaking.

Visually, printmaking often has a strong sense of structure and formal economy. Images are typically organized around black and white, light and shadow, line and plane, rhythm and contrast. Forms are distilled rather than expanded; contours tend to be clear, and the overall effect can be decorative, forceful, and precise. Yet different print techniques produce very different temperaments. Woodcuts often feel robust and direct, with a kind of honest roughness. Copperplate prints are usually more delicate and intricate. Lithographs retain something of the freedom of drawing, while screen prints often feel flatter, brighter, and closer to modern graphic design. The beauty of printmaking lies in both the final image and the visible process of making. A print does not entirely hide how it came into being—and that is part of its charm.

Among the many branches of printmaking, water-based woodblock printing stands out for its distinctly Eastern sensibility. Built on the principle of separate blocks for separate colors, it uses water-based pigments or ink and relies on the absorbency of paper, the diffusion of color, and repeated overprinting to achieve subtle chromatic layers. Its difficulty lies in the quiet things: block separation, precise registration, the control of moisture, and the transitions between color layers. The result is often soft, luminous, translucent, and restrained.

This is precisely where water-based woodblock printing differs from the more familiar forms of traditional printmaking, especially black-and-white or oil-based woodcuts. Traditional woodcuts tend to emphasize strong contrast, sharp carving marks, bold rhythm, and immediate visual impact. They have more edge, more weight, and more of the grain and force of the wood itself. Water-based woodblock prints, by contrast, are more concerned with the spreading and breathing of color, with layered permeation, and with atmosphere rather than assertion. Their boundaries are not always hard; their images often feel gentler, more fluid, and closer to the aesthetics of Chinese painting, where ink and color mingle and where emptiness is never quite empty. If traditional woodcuts persuade through structure and strength, water-based woodblock prints move us through nuance, moisture, and mood. They preserve the tactile beauty of printmaking while taking on something of the lyricism and quiet reserve of Eastern painting.

So while this may not have been the most efficient museum visit—there were only a few exhibitions open—it turned out to be unexpectedly rewarding. Encountering an art form one had barely understood before and leaving with one’s assumptions pleasantly rearranged is a good outcome. Sometimes a sparse museum day can offer more than a crowded one.

Admission to Jiangsu Art Museum is free. As for how long a visit might take, that really depends on the scale of the exhibitions on view.