I

　　Pre-Qing Dynasty woodblock printing had always been regulated by literature and religion. It was seen as merely a means for something. We have never been clear about its own ends. Some researchers have proposed changing the terminology from ‘Chinese printing history’ to ‘Chinese illustration history’, which only adds to its subordinate and subservient position. Traditional printing is a marginalized type of art with a low position and unclear identity that has had difficulty gaining recognition in official history. In the twentieth century, printing found a hitherto unknown vitality, and ‘prospered’ in the years surrounding the Second World War and the early stages of the People’s Republic. But the true situation is obvious – in these two periods, printing was stuck on the realm of ‘tools’. In the eyes of the national ideology, the only use for printing was to obediently promote ideas, and was never allowed to ponder or voice dissent.

　　When the nation’s gates reopened, the reproductive advantages of woodblocks collapsed with the arrival of machine reproduction, and printing lost favor in the eyes of ideology. Ideology required a more advanced industrialized and scaled art form. Meanwhile, the aging of concepts was an issue that befuddled printmakers. Printmaking was facing trouble on two fronts, and teetered between the cold receptions of palace art and avant-garde art. The end was unavoidable. New forms of printing with contemporary consciousness and independent character were rare before the appearance of Wang Nengtao’s New Propaganda Posters. Xu Bing’s highly influential late eighties piece Xi Shi Jian was one of the valuable ones. It used its destructiveness to make it an important road sign on the path to the end of old-style printmaking.

　　There’s no point in reiterating the casualties inflicted by this heavenly scripture, but strictly speaking, it prophesied the end days. It didn’t fully hit the vital organs of old-style printmaking. The false ideographs in Xi Shi Jian bring woodcarving into the realm of etymology, negating the possibility of using the visual language of woodcarving to resist the rule of language and bring it down another blind alley of logical inference in that it never truly addressed the issue of printing being subservient to words. Adding the overly elitist design of the false ideographs, it wasn’t able to be much use to the folk-based writing system, and time went to show that it was nothing more than a self-contained conceptual game. The New Propaganda Posters that Wang Nengtao has been creating since the turn of the century are aimed at the most fundamental issues faced by printmaking. It enters from the aspects of words and images and casts off the two heavy mountains that have been pressing down on printmaking – words and religion, and without looking back, it brings printmaking right into the realm of new issues, the topics that are much more important to us in this era. This marks the end of traditional printmaking and the path to the doors of independent thought.

　　II

　　In order to call Wang Nengtao’s works New Propaganda Posters, one must first resolve two issues: what is meant by “new”, and what is actually being propagandized? Only when the second issue is resolved can we define Wang Nengtao’s propaganda posters as “new”. In the times of centralized power, the term ‘propaganda’ was once full of unsavory undertones. It was used to poison the people’s minds, strip them of the power of independent analysis and execute some unspeakable goal. Wang Nengtao’s images have an anti-propaganda awareness. They request that printmaking no longer works for the dependent aims of other ideologies such as literature, religion, commerce or power, instead that it proactively spreads an expression that is full of the sounds of personal freedom. Once art gains self-awareness, it will automatically break with the past.

　　‘New’ is used in terms of being opposite to ‘old’. It is both a continuation and a step forward, but what is really important is that it represents something that hasn’t been there before. What Wang Nengtao is promoting is a ‘neo-utopianism’. This new ism is a transcendence of eternally unfulfilled utopian daydreams and old idealism. ‘Neo-utopianism’ is a commitment to future happiness. It is not hard to discover to slogans and symbols in New Propaganda Posters, as they are all Wang Nengtao’s personal visions about the new utopia. These visions are a step above the false, empty and inevitably withering false utopian ideals of the Cultural Revolution. All of the signs indicate that the current society is not promoting, but continually obstructing the emergence of any form of utopia.

　　Slogans are the most direct transmitters of wishes. They’re not shouted out through dogmas. Empty chants have always been short on power – they must have images as positive and negative evidence. Wang Nengtao’s dissolution of the empty palace dialogue is exactly the opposite. First, the slogans appear in a leading position in the picture only to be smashed by the image, which hints at the logical preposterousness of images and words. Through this he consigns the false utopian dialogue to limbo, replacing it with Wang Nengtao’s world ideals founded in universalism. At the same time, the dauntless attitude of positive struggle that has persisted since the founding of the People’s Republic is transferred over by Wang Nengtao; amidst the strikes of doubt towards collectivism, and based on his own kind heartedness and his wide open frame of mind, we can see that aside from the bloodstains left by the construction of this nation-state there are still some things worth cherishing and respecting: in an age of law of the jungle capitalism, the family-style socialist imagination has a warm side, and it vanquished the faceless fear of homelessness. In the portraits in Wang Nengtao’s New Propaganda Posters, one cannot detect the slightest trace of fear or dread. In the eyes of these people, all we see is unbending determination.

　　III

　　Wang Nengtao had already announced the appearance of “Neo-utopianism” much earlier with Chronicle of Fleeting Time. This utopian illusion is not the forgetting of historic tribulations but transcendence on a much higher level; only with transcendence can we better deal with tribulation. The positive mental state inside New Propaganda Posters tries to wipe away all manner of anxiety. When you live in the hatred and haze of the past, you trap yourself in an eternal cage. The Chinese people of today need to reshape their self confidence after a century of humiliation and suffering to help them get on the road again. New Propaganda Posters plans to be useful in this regard. Lu Xun[i] racked his brains over how to make woodcarving prosper in modern China , first because woodblocks could print on paper and be immediately disseminated, and secondly because the fates of woodblock printing and the nation state are inextricably linked. New Propaganda Posters has already shown marks and effects of a strong effort in this direction. What Wang Nengtao needs to worry about is when and where he should stop looking back at the past so that New Propaganda Posters is not misunderstood as lacking depth of thought and being a mere blind filtering of the past.

　　Lu Xun had already recognized by 1930 that woodblocks were absolutely not wasted bones dressed up in new attire, but the common psychological desire of artists and society. Wang Nengtao observed this, and never made any pointless stops in the linguistic and formic exploration of printmaking. Of course in comparison to Chronicle of Fleeting Time, New Propaganda Posters has obviously discarded surplus elements in the picture and established a distance from the conventions of pop. The colors go from gray to bright, and every line in the picture sparkles against the pure color backdrop and appears clean and refined. More than just tools for creating shapes, the independent lines accurately hint at the emotions of the people in the picture. Wang Nengtao’s images are more concerned with direct observation; he’s not very interested in concepts, and he hasn’t prepared a lot of expressional content in his pictures, which would only get in the way of his focus on utopian fantasies. His destructiveness is in that his pure and concentrated images assist in the giant visual stimulus of the overall picture. This, and the constant correspondence and preposterousness of the multiple relationships between word and image have saved printmaking from the humiliating realm of a subservient toy and conceptual game, and opened another kind of contemporariness for printmaking.

　　Chen Yinke[ii] once said that the academics of an era must have its own new material and issues. Though this is a simple statement, it makes for the best footnote on contemporariness. Though Wang Nengtao’s New Propaganda Posters aim towards the future, they more squarely face the present. His art has for many years worked to promote the transformation of the ‘individual’ identity in society into that of the ‘citizen’. The ‘individual’ in the classicalist sense is one who doubts so-called social justice, shared responsibility and universal ethics; the contemporary concept of ‘citizen’ abandons the narrow definition of ‘individual’, is not satisfied with himself, and is more concerned with personal well-being within the greater good of the overall nation-state.

　　Therefore, in Wang Nengtao’s New Propaganda Posters, aside from the images of China ’s leaders, the likenesses of his family members have started to play an important role. Whether they are mementos of that special time or images from the most recently recorded happy times, aside from having the personal qualities of fresh personas, they’re also naturally tinted with a corresponding aura of the times. Wang Nengtao’s ability is to appropriately mix these two elements into a perpetual whole; almost all of his prints cherish images as if they will be gone in an instant. Unlike other contemporary works that often make use of family resources, Wang Nengtao’s images have most soberly presented a structural societal scene that these particular people were truly born into, rather than that overly empty familial imagination.

Translated by Jeff Crosby

作者：段君