ZHANG FUMING
Artist-Printmaker | Contemporary Printmaking Practice

On Woodcut: A Reflection​
December 2024
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This reflection considers woodcut not simply as a printmaking technique, but as a material and conceptual framework within my practice.
My work is grounded in black-and-white relief carving, and much of its formal language emerges from the physical conditions of the medium itself: resistance, subtraction, pressure, and repetition. In woodcut, the image is produced through removal. This shifts the logic of mark-making. Forms are not built through additive gestures, but through decisions about what must be cut away, retained, or held in tension.
 

In my practice, this condition is not only technical but structural. The resistance of wood, the force required to carve, and the pace of printing shape how I think about image-making. The process is slow and cumulative, and it demands a sustained negotiation between control and interruption. Rather than treating woodcut as a vehicle for reproduction alone, I approach it as a way of organising pressure, contrast, and duration within the image.
 

That same logic informs my subject matter. I am interested in working bodies and the psychological weight of contemporary life. These are not approached as descriptive scenes, but as compressed visual structures in which negative space, hard boundaries, and black mass carry as much meaning as figuration.

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