Communal Work— Collective Carving As Form

About the Exhibition

Founded in October 2019, the Print & Carve Dept. was formed by a group of friends interested in printmaking and concerned about social issues. The current members are Ses, I, Wato, LH. Unlike individual printmaking works, their woodblock prints are not only created by the members collectively but also through workshops in which social activist groups are invited to collaborate. Through this process of collective creation, they seek to engage with society and explore the possibility of using collective creation as a means of constructing their standpoint on political and social issues. Print & Carve Dept. has collaborated with TIWA (Taiwan International Workers Association), TISM (Taiwan International Student Movement), DCU (Domestic Caretaker Union), and labor protestors in several strike rallies. Print & Carve Dept. actively reaches out to the communities and people, inviting them to participate in the creations, and to practice empowerment and restoration of rights through mobile assemblies.

The history of modern woodblock prints depicting social realism is deeply rooted in Asia, from Lu Xun’s Modern Woodcut Movement to Huang Rong-Can’s anonymous work, The Horrifying Inspection, to the democratization movement in the 1980s and the Indonesian confrontation with totalitarianism in the 1990s, which has evolved over the years into the activist woodblock collective of today. This unique contemporary printmaking collective is not only locally rooted, but also has an international network of connections and influences that accompany the history of left-wing movements in Asia.

The historical context of this exhibition can be traced to Taring Padi in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which was founded in the late 1990s, leading to Pangrok Sulap in Sabah, Malaysia, and further to A3BC (Anti-War, Anti-Nuclear and Arts of Block-print) in Tokyo, Japan, and later to Print & Carve Dept. in Taiwan and Printhow in Hong Kong. The thematic concerns of these groups vary from environmental sustainability and farmers’ rights to anti-war, peace, democracy, and freedom, however, they all share a similar core ideology, namely the DIT (Do It Together) approach to stand with the socially disadvantaged and continue to develop a collective artistic practice.

Communal Work— Collective Carving As Form focuses on the woodprints produced by the aforementioned five groups, and illustrates their perspectives on collective printmaking, social engagement, and their interrelationship with the international printmaking communities, in an attempt to delineate a collective image of the contemporary activism woodprints from East and Southeast Asia, and to capture the spirit of resistance they hold in their practice.