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Chinese Prints for Beginners
Modern Chinese art prints are an exciting new genre in the art market but little known in and outside of China. This article provides some practical buying tips for art friends who are new to the subject and are interested in acquiring modern Chinese prints.
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Tips for Buying Chinese Art Prints
Chinese prints are a developing market both in and outside of China. In 2007 demand picked up and it looked like the fledgling market would take off in the wake of the booming market of contemporary Chinese paintings. But then came the great financial crisis and the worldwide recession. For art friends who can still afford to buy art, in my view a great chance, maybe the last chance to build up an important collection or to acquire a few works by leading Chinese printmakers for the sake of their beauty. Here are a few tips I want to share with you.
Buy only what you personally like.
Do not build up a collection under the aspect of a financial investment. First of all, art is meant to enjoy you, to add something to your life that money alone cannot buy. But of course, you should also keep an eye on the preservation or development of the value of your art object. But do not make this your sole criteria for your buying decisions.
Pay what it is worth for you.
Ask yourself the question: "Is this art object worth the price for me?" If you are in doubt, leave it. The best purchases are sometimes the ones you do not make.
Which artists should you buy?
Again, first of all, the ones you like. And in second place I recommend to choose leading artists or young, promising artists who do not have an impressive résumé, but who have caused some interest in minor exhibitions like a graduate show of the art academy or in a provincial exhibition.
As the Chinese art prints market is not yet developed, even the works of well-established, leading artists are not yet expensive. You can afford them.
How can I recognize a leading artist?
China has a lively exhibition art scene in a well-structured hierarchical order. Also the artists are organized in a scheme of printmakers' and artists' associations. Both the associations and the exhibitions are organized on three levels: national, on provincial level and on city or county level. The structure of a once completely state-organized art scene is still existing, although it is now dwindling slowly.
The most important exhibitions for a Chinese printmaker are the "National Chinese Print Exhibitions" and the "National Chinese Art Exhibitions". Recently some others like the "Yunnan International Print Exhibition" or the "International Guanlan Print Biennial" have gained importance. These exhibitions are juried art shows for which maybe only 10% of the art objects submitted by artists, are approved and selected. The best works shown at these art shows, are afterwards usually integrated into local museums.
Some of the leading artists have also exhibited outside of China like in Japan. These are usually travelling art shows organized by Chinese state institutions.
Check also for awards that artists may have received. The top awards are those received in one of the art shows on national level.
Publications are another indicator for the importance of an artist. Once a book or booklet has been published about his or her works, you can assume that the artist is "leading".
And finally you can judge from the kind of "posts" that an artist holds. For instance chairman of the provincial printmakers association or art professor at an art academy or art institute are such indicators.
Could it be that the artists who dominate the official art scenes are not the ones that will one day be really important? - like at the time when the French impressionists were the "réfusés", the outcasts that later became the big names? In our view not at all. At least not at all in the scene of printmakers. The "official" artists have a rather large degree of freedom to create whatever nonsense they want - with certain political limits of course. But they may show in their art works Mao Zedong with a coke bottle in his hand or a crazy dancing pose without having to fear troubles.
Pay attention to editions sizes.
One of the great charms for art friends and collectors are the small edition sizes of Chinese prints. For established artists they are typically from 20 to 100. Regarding the potentially huge Chinese market and also compared to international standards this is very, very small.
Prints by leading artists from the 1980s and 1990s often have edition sizes as small as 10 or even less. At that time there was no market in China for art prints. The artists created their works for exhibitions and for friends. You ask how they could make a living? Good question! Quite simple, they were state-employed at art academies, universities, art teachers or at art institutes. Quite a few of them, still are by the way.
Regarding young, emerging artists, edition sizes of 5 to 10 are not unusual. This makes their works even more interesting for collectors.
Signed and Numbered
These are a few general rules for buying art prints:
- Signed is better than not signed.
- Numbered is better than A.P. A.P. stands for "artist's proof" and was meant as a small quantity (like 10% of an edition) for the artist's personal use. But in practice it is used to expand a design beyond the original edition size.
- A.P. is better than an open edition.
Contemporary Chinese art prints are nearly always signed numbered and dated. A.P. marked prints are rare. I would accept them if the print is out of print and the artist is as famous as for instance Zhang Minjie or if you like the work so much that it is personally OK for you.
Go for early prints.
Today the rarest modern Chinese art prints are those from the 1980s and 1990s. If you see any with a reasonable price from this period and if you like them, buy them.
Should you go for specific printing techniques?
The oldest technique used in China is the woodblock print with water-soluble inks. After ca. 1980 modern Western techniques like silkscreen, etching or lithographs came to China and all artists started to experiment with these new techniques. But only few found them suitable for creating meaningful art prints and most went back to the concept of woodblock prints. Most artists use oil-based inks and not water-soluble inks. That is not just a technicality. Prints made with water-soluble inks look like watercolors and require a different paper.
I personally would not restrict myself to just woodblock prints in my selections of Chinese art prints as many collectors of Japanese prints do. It is basically a matter of personal tastes.
Go for Reduction Woodblock Prints
Reduction woodblock prints are a new form of woodblock prints that are said to have been "invented" by printmakers in Yunnan in the early 1980s. Instead of using one block for each color, each color is carved onto the same block, one layer after the other. Thus the block is destroyed at the end and not only a few trees are spared but no more copies can ever be pulled again after the originally planned edition was printed.
This is a great thing for collectors as they can assume that the print design will not be devalued by adding more A.P. or second and third editions to the original edition size.
However it is very difficult to recognize if a print was made in woodblock or reduction woodblock technique. We at artelino make no exception and have to rely on the specifications we get by the artists. As a rule of thumb the number of different colors for a reduction woodblock print is limited to maybe half a dozen. But there are of course also combinations of more than one block possible - created by the reduction principle.
Any pitfalls?
As with all art categories, also the modern Chinese prints have potential pitfalls for new collectors. An annoying thing is the edition numbering. Over the years we have discovered inconsistencies in edition numbering of the kind that two copies of the same design show up with let's say the number 5/15 (5 out of a total edition of 15) and then 6 months later as 12/25. Also different dating has been seen - something that is however a normal practice among Western printmakers too who sign the year when they actually printed a copy and not when the block or plate was created.
This mess has fortunately minor dimensions and is not the result of a "bad guy" attitude. Rather Chinese artists with their cultural background of complete unawareness for copyright issues, could have cared less as they never had a market in their mind. Like most contemporary printmakers in the world, they do not print a complete edition (with the exception of prints made in reduction woodblock technique when they have no other option), but rather print on demand. But in contrast to Western artists, the Chinese have not always kept track of the original edition size, date of first printing etc. This was not of any concern for them - mainly in the 1980s and 1990s when they exclusively created art works for exhibitions.
We have also received reliable information from another dealer in Chinese prints who had seen prints that had the same edition number - let's say 49/150 twice. They were by Hao Boyi.
Another problem that we encountered in the past were prints by Zhao Tianqi that were offered to as unnumbered single prints and then the same design showed up somewhere else. Annoying.
As we have been and are to our knowledge still the only distributor of importance for modern Chinese prints outside of China, we have since then made good progress in "educating" the Chinese artists. I think these stupid practices are now a thing of the past. And when we offer prints by Zhao Tianqi or Hao Boyi we add a note to our descriptions. Both artists are by the way in my view too important to ignore them when building up a collection of modern Chinese art prints. By the way, among famous Western artists, the print works of the great Salvador Dali too have major problems with fakes due to the carelessness of Dali.
Check the print size before you buy.
Most Chinese art prints are huge. Many do not fit into the drawers of a typical cabinet to store them. The Chinese have made them so large because large prints get more attention at exhibitions. But thus they are not very convenient for collectors. Modern Western prints are not much different by the way, but the Chinese are a bit "more large" than all others.
It is what it is. And it is your choice. But please read artelino's descriptions with care before you buy. And please accept that it costs to ship such "giants" in a safe flat package to us. We charge less to you than we pay, but it still may seem high for you.
Condition and Papers
The condition of a print is very important for its value. Chinese prints, mainly those from the 1980s and 1990s, are often in not perfect condition. They may have been sent to exhibitions and have creases or small tears on margins due to unprofessional transport. The Chinese printmakers are as much amateurs in safe shipping of their art works as most of their Western colleagues.
Another factor that you should take into consideration is a low quality of paper for early modern Chinese prints. Do not expect the top quality paper like the French "Rives BFK" or by other Western paper mills. In the 1980s and 1990s this paper was not available for the Chinese artists. And later many artists discovered that the Western quality paper was not appropriate for typically Chinese techniques like the use of water-soluble inks.
The good thing about the poor paper is that one day when the Chinese print market will be fully developed, it will be one help for experts to recognize an original from a fake.
What about Fakes?
We have not yet seen or heard of any fakes of modern Chinese art prints. The market is still too unimportant to encourage fakes, I guess.
Where to learn more.
In the section of artelino's articles about art, you currently find 190 articles when you select "Chinese Art" as a category. There are many artists' biographies but also pages with general information or for instance book recommendations that help to intensify your knowledge about Chinese art prints.
Videos about Chinese Prints
On Video: Chinese Prints you find a video with some practical buying tips for modern Chinese prints.
Dieter Wanczura
(December 2008)
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