A Case for Printmaking | Zhang Fuming

A Case for Printmaking: Perspective from a Black-and-White Woodcut Printmaker
March 2025

Printmaking is a medium shaped by both history and reinvention. It has served practical, political, and artistic functions across different periods, from the reproduction of texts and images to the development of highly individual visual languages. Yet within contemporary art contexts, painting, installation, and sculpture are often more readily recognised as primary modes of artistic expression, while printmaking continues to be reduced to process, technique, or craft.

The question, however, is not simply whether printmaking has a long history, but how it functions within contemporary art today. In my view, printmaking should not be understood as a secondary medium whose legitimacy depends on reproductive utility, nor as a traditional craft defined only by technical proficiency. It becomes a contemporary artistic language when it is used critically: as a way of constructing images, organising material decisions, and developing conceptual form through process. What makes printmaking function as fine art is therefore not medium hierarchy, but the depth of inquiry, formal rigour, and intentionality brought to the work.

Black-and-white woodcut printmaking, in particular, is often misread as simple. Perhaps because of its monochromatic palette, graphic clarity, or apparent directness. Early in my career, I encountered remarks that described my work as “easy” or “unfinished.” In response, I experimented with layering, deconstruction, and increased visual complexity in order to challenge those assumptions. Over time, however, I came to understand that simplicity itself can be exacting. It demands clarity, precision, and restraint. In woodcut, each cut is irreversible; every mark alters the structure of the image, and decisions accumulate without the possibility of erasure. This condition requires not only technical skill, but a sustained formal and conceptual discipline.

The physicality of woodcut is central to this discipline. Carving, inking, and printing are labour-intensive acts that require direct engagement with resistance, pressure, and pace. The image is produced through subtraction, and the process continually negotiates control and interruption. This physical relationship to the matrix shapes the final work: black mass, carved line, and negative space do not function merely as stylistic features, but as records of force, duration, and decision. Even where the image appears visually spare, it carries a dense structure of material negotiation.

Printmaking is also frequently misunderstood through the lens of multiplicity. The capacity to produce an edition is often mistaken for simple repetition, as if number alone diminishes artistic value. In practice, editioning is a rigorous discipline. Particularly in hand-printing, each impression requires its own sequence of inking, pressure control, registration, lifting, drying, and selection. Consistency is pursued through skill, judgement, and sustained labour, while material variation remains part of the medium’s reality.
Multiplicity in printmaking should therefore not be read as a loss of value, but as a defining condition of the medium, one that combines technical discipline, material sensitivity, and conceptual structure.

What circulates in an edition is not a facsimile detached from process, but an original impression produced through direct contact between matrix, ink, paper, and pressure. Each print belongs to a shared structure while retaining a specific material history of making. In this sense, printmaking complicates narrow assumptions about singularity and originality, and offers another way of understanding authorship through repetition, variation, and labour.

Despite its complexity, printmaking is still often positioned as a secondary discipline within contemporary art discourse. This perception persists not because the medium lacks conceptual or formal capacity, but because its material and procedural rigour is frequently underestimated. A contemporary understanding of printmaking requires looking beyond reproduction as a category and attending instead to how artists use the medium to think, construct, and transform images. Black-and-white woodcut remains, for me, a vital and evolving form. One that continues to offer conceptual depth, technical challenge, and relevance within contemporary art practice.